The Linguist - language learning should be fun

Learning words and the use of the dictionary.

Learning words is the key task in language learning, but the dictionary is over-rated as a language learning tool. Here I talk about why I feel this way.

Canada's Governor General eats a raw seal's heart.

The official head of state in Canada is the Governor General, the representative of the Queen in Canada.  Few Canadians really understand why this is so, or care. However, the present Governor General, Michaelle Jean, just made herself a hero in my view by partaking of a traditional meal of raw seal's heart and other delicacies when visiting with some Inuits in the Far North. She can remain Governor General for as long as she wants.

The European protest against the Canadian seal hunt is sheer hypocrisy. Animals are slaughtered in more cruel ways in Europe for food and fur, all the time.  The protest against the wearing of fur is hypocrisy. We humans are part of the food chain.

The Inuit have been hunting seals and eating raw seal hearts for eons. The Canadian Head of State accepted their hospitality and partook of their culture. She made a statement of inclusion of one of the important indigenous cultures of Canada. The Inuit accepted her and she accepted them. Great stuff!!

Boston and the pledge of allegiance

Boston is a delightful city. There are many parks, green spaces and water, both lakes and the ocean. You sense the history of America in the colonial style houses, the historical monuments and various signs reminding you of what happened there 200 or more years ago. The people are sometimes a little gruff, but usually tremendously friendly and chatty. Houses have plaques telling you that they were built in 1687 or 1756 or whatever.

We were visiting my older son Eric, who is a fellow at Harvard for a year. He lives in Arlington and commutes to Harvard by bike or roller-blades through a green bike path and then by subway. I enjoyed jogging on that trail while listening to Russian and Portuguese.

My wife and I visited towns like Concord, Salem and Ipswich and really felt the history of the country. At Concord we saw groups of school children being taught about the details of the first battle of the American War of Independence. Amongst the teachers and school children were people of East Asian and South Asian origin. It all kind of warms the heart of an assimilationist melting-potter like me.

It is great to have children of all origins feel pride in their common history as Americans. We should do more of this in Canada, instead of constantly dwelling on the differences of Canadians. There should be limits to this patriotic indoctrination, however. My 6 year old granddaughter,  has already learned to spout the American pledge of allegiance. Cute, I guess, but she certainly does not have the first clue what the words mean. I also have trouble with indoctrinating little children in causes, however noble they may be. I think children should be taught to read, and then be given as many different sources of information as possible about things like religion, politics, history, the environment or any other subject of study.

They should not be taught to interpret this information, nor taught critical thinking, just encouraged to read and form their own opinions, and then be prepared to defend them in writing and speaking. They should be encouraged to respect the views of others that may differ from their own, yet not hesitate to critique these views and find ways to support their own ideas.

Language discrimination

Do employers discriminate based on language ability? Of course they do. Survey after survey shows that communication skills are at the top of the list of attributes that employers are looking for. The conclusion, in my view, is that immigrants need to work harder to improve their English skills. The government also needs to be more straight forward in pointing this out to immigrants. The idea that an "officially multicultural" Canada which supposedly "celebrates diversity" discriminates less than, say, a "melting pot" like the US, is just nonsense. The work place is a like a team, and therefore needs to be a melting pot.

 

A recent study reported that

"Across the board, those with English names such as Greg Johnson and Michael Smith were 40 per cent more likely to receive callbacks than people with the same education and job experience with Indian, Chinese or Pakistani names such as Maya Kumar, Dong Liu and Fatima Sheikh."

"Sixteen per cent of those with English names received a callback, compared with 11 per cent for applicants with Pakistani, Indian and Chinese names who had the same level of education and job experience.

The callback rate dropped to 8 per cent for those with foreign-sounding names who had been educated outside Canada but had Canadian job experience. It dropped to 5 per cent for those who also lacked Canadian job experience."

 According to Globe and Mail writer Marina Jimenez, "The findings not only challenge Canada's reputation as a country that celebrates diversity, but also underscore the difficulties that even highly skilled immigrants have in the labour market.

"Moreover, there was nothing in the study to reveal whether the “foreign-sounding” names were those of immigrants or of people born in Canada, suggesting that the offspring of immigrants also face name discrimination. "

To me there is nothing surprising in the report. It has been my experience that immigrants tend to have poor English skills. What is more they are not motivated to put in the effort required to really improve.  This kind of report, unfortunately, just reinforces that attitude.

I say this as an employer that has always had around 30-40% immigrants as employees. Nowadays the majority of job applicants for many jobs are immigrants. A few years we posted for a job and of over 40 applications received, entirely from immigrants, only 4 were in correct English. Most of the applicants were graduates of Canadian universities!

The fact that the report did not track whether the job applicants were immigrants or people born in Canada does not "suggest that offspring of immigrants face discrimination" as Jimenez suggests,  it just means that the report did not track a very important bit of information. In other words are people being discriminated against because of their name or because they are immigrants and not likely to speak English well?

The author of the report, Prof. Philip Oreopoulos, a University of British Columbia economist , had the following to say

“Unfortunately, the study shows an applicant's name matters considerably more than his or her additional education, multiple language skills and extracurricular activities.

There was only marginally less discrimination for jobs with less of a need for speaking and writing skills, such as accountants, computer programmers and web developers. "

Well, in my experience, accounting, programming and web developing do require good communication skills in English. As for multiple language skills, they are not relevant to most jobs and probably best left off the resume.

As for discrimination, yes there is discrimination. If I go to a Japanese restaurant run by Koreans, I find only Korean employees. Minority employers hire their own, largely. This was once explained to me by a recent Chinese immigrant in these terms. "This is not discrimination. It is just the Chinese employer expects that a Chinese person will work harder". ( OK. Now I understand)

Large employers have their "diversity" programmers, but most small and medium sized employers hire people they are going to be comfortable with. It need not mean the same ethnic background but it does mean very good communication skills and the ability to fit in. 

Larger "ethnic" employers may also want to give "their own" a better chance. I buy computer equipment at two stores here in Vancouver. London Drugs, which is owned by a third generation Chinese Canadian, and Future Shop which is owned by Iranian Canadian interests.  Guess which store has more  staff of Chinese origin and which has more staff of  Iranian origin?

I think the average Canadian employer is, by and large, more open minded than employers in other countries. He has to be, that is the labour market here. In Toronto, people of part British origin are only around 50% of the population according to a 2001 census, but those of single English, Scottish, or Irish origin  were less than 10%. This share would be even lower today. So the employers who were surveyed here are more than likely not to have an English name themselves. Certainly the vast majority of job seekers do not have English sounding names.

To me the only useful conclusion here is that immigrants need to work harder on their English, and need to accept that there may be some discrimination, but these are obstacles that they can overcome. They may want to consider taking on an English names, at least for work, but that will not help much if their English skills are not good enough. They should sign up for LingQ!

Here is some more information on the report from a CTV report with some additional comments from me in italics.

Oreopoulos said they used websites such as Workopolis.com, Monster.com, Craigslist.com and Jobbank.ca to find the postings to send resumés to.

"In that big pile of 100 resumés that they receive, two or three of them in there are the ones from my study, so it doesn't disrupt their everyday process of making a decision on who to hire."

But they still had 100 resumes to go through. That is an important point.

He found that resumés with foreign names could only improve their chances of getting a job if they had Canadian or British work experience.

In fact, callbacks nearly doubled with the addition of just one previous job in Canada.

So is it the name?

Twenty per cent of the resumés with foreign names even listed fluency in English, French and their mother tongue, but Oreopoulos said "it did not seem to make a difference at all."

No one is going to say they are not fluent in English. What does that mean?

Another interesting finding was that, Chinese resumes that had English first names increased the chances of getting a callback.

He said his study only represents a trend for small to medium sized businesses.

Bigger firms, such as banks, have their own application forms on their websites and because of time restraints he could not include them in his study.

If the opportunity presents itself, he said he would like to do more research grouping businesses into categories based on size and comparing English names to other European names.

He suggested the government could offer more help to recent immigrants "get their foot in the door" at their first job.

How about making the immigrants responsible for their own language skills? Fund them directly, reward them for success, publicize success stories and stop beating the discrimination drum. Stop funding surveys like this one that just cost the tax payer money.

Teaching the present continuous in English

Can we teach the "present continuous" in English? Is it not just picked up naturally, and even if it is not, does it matter? I know fluent English speakers who say "I am living in Germany since 4 years" , it is not correct yet these people communicate very well in English at a sophisticated level.

If we create a lot of rules about it does that help the learner or confuse the learner?  I know that in learning Russian, the only rules that helped were the very simple ones such as "god" "goda" and "lyet" for years depending on whether it is one, 2-4 or 5 and more. All the rest of the rules are a fog.

Here are parts of a discussion among teachers about the present continuous. First a justification for focusing teaching efforts on this point and then a discussion of how to explain it to the class ,most of whom are immigrants from Latin America.

  I wonder how useful it is to teach this, as opposed to just letting learners notice the language, and helping them to notice, in other words saving words  and phrases the way we do at LingQ.

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The use of the progressive is a linguistic redundancy, as its use is not necessary to create meaning which you cannot create without it.  American Sign Language and Hawaii Creole (“Pidgin”) English, for example, do not use the progressive; neither do German, Turkish, or French, but Spanish does.

 

What I believe, however, doesn’t attain the threshold of challengability is the need to help our students become viable participants in life domains they are aspiring to engage in.  There are very many speech communities in which the use of the present continuous is an implicit if not explicit requirement.  In the absence of its use, one’s English would be considered “substandard.”

 

Might you have second thoughts about seeing a native English-speaking doctor who doesn’t use the present continuous? 

 

So, we have to differentiate between linguistic systems (all equal in their own right), and sociolinguistic considerations that tie in with where are students wish to go…

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I tell my students that there are three ways to construct future time in English (which doesn’t, in a sense, have a future tense at all because the spelling of the main verb doesn’t change but remains in its base form):

 

The “certain future,” which uses the simple present progressive construction, as in I’m going home after work. (I don’t call the non-perfect form of the progressive only  progressive, because it fails to create a dichotomy with the perfect progressive, so I latch “simple” in front of it – that way we have four aspects or “perspectives,” as I refer to them: simple, simple progressive, perfect, and perfect progressive.)

 

The “probable future,” which uses the “going to + verb”, as in It’s cloudy, it looks like it’s going to rain (therein lies the “plan,” in this case the weather’s plan).

 

The “pure future,” which uses “will + verb,” as in I will travel to France one day, it’s my life’s dream.

Hi, all.

The point  about how “going to” when used to show an action in the near future is not recognized unless pronounced as “gonna”  is interesting and important, I think. And it brings up the intersection of oral and written English skills development.

 

We do not pronounce “going to” the same way when it is used as the main verb. We do not say “I’m ‘gonna’ [going to] the store” – although in normal, relaxed speech we may very well say “I’m ‘gonna’ go [going to go] to the store. ‘Gonna” occurs in the near future use of ‘going to’ as a result of the stress, timing, rhythm, and intonation patterns of English.

 

So, when practicing present continuous in class – it seems we need to be on top of listening and speaking and reading and writing of the verb forms.

 

Any thoughts on this? How does that resonate with your experience when you’re working with this form?

I don't teach "be going to" with present continuous.  I teach it with future.  It's not necessarily a near future issue.  "I'm going to go to China."     It implies a definite plan, not sure when, but clearly future.  When I teach future "be going to" with the reduced pronunciation, I do point out that reduction cannot be made when "be going to" is used for present tense destinations (i.e, I'm going to the store) because there is not another meaning carrying verb (although not necessarily in those terms :-))

Whose fault is it that I cannot speak the language?

If I lived in a country for ten years ( Mexico, Japan, France, Russian whatever) and could not speak the language, whose fault would it be? I think it would be mine, only mine. Here is a question or a comment to one of my earlier posts from a language teacher, and my answer. What do you think?

The question

I have a question for all of you. I teach English in Canada to immigrants. Some of the students in my classes have been in Canada for more than 5 years. They were taught by a teacher who used a lot of talking and writing but very little grammar instruction and, I think, not much correction. After all this time, their English is still very poor. One student speaks very broken English and understands just basic conversation. The others (8-12 years in Canada) understand fairly well but their speech is very difficult to understand because of their incorrect pronunciation and poor sentence structure. When they speak quickly I can't understand them at all.

Any ideas? How can I help them break the bad language habits they've formed? It isn't even really their fault, some of them are very diligent students.

My answer

It would be helpful to know how many students are in your class and how many hours they are in class, how literate they are, what they are interested in etc.

I do not think you will like my advice.

First of all their language skills, after 5 to 12 years in Canada, are entirely their responsibility in my view. Until they recognize that they will not improve. That is where you need to begin. Their attitude towards the language, their determination to improve, their belief that they can learn to speak fluently, these are the keys to their success. Your first goal is to try to inspire this kind of attitude in them.

Second, what they do outside of the classroom is much more important than what they do in the classroom. There is considerable research to indicate that correction and grammar explanation do not do much, so I doubt that the lack of it, over a period of 5 years, is the reason their
language skills are poor.

In my view, they need to listen a lot, several hours a day, to English. The best way is to load content of interest to them on an MP3 player and always carry it with them. Listen every spare moment, while doing chores, while commuting etc..They should choose content they like, where they like the voice, and listen. They need to listen to the same content over and over, imitating. They need to notice words and phrases, save them, review them and imitate them. When they do write and speak, their corrected phrases should be added to this list.

They should also take every opportunity to watch TV listen to radio, read the newspaper and talk to people around them in English, not their native language, at least for a concentrated period of 6 months or more.

Esperanto and French immersion

Esperanto was developed to be a neutral international language, an alternative to the dominance of one language. French immersion is a popular way for English speaking school children to learn French. I have been asked to comment on these and so here goes.

Download Esperanto

Language learning, literacy, advocacy, job protection and what works.

I believe that language learning and literacy learning are closely related. I am sure that I will get criticism over the following but I welcome it. I want to learn.

Here is the podcast

" In the USA at least 30 million, and arguably 93 million, adults would benefit from
additional literacy instruction, and that the system today can only serve
approximately 3 million adults through combined federal, state, and
philanthropic funding.”  according to ProLiteracy, a major US organization devoted to improving literacy.

Their website sets the tone. "We need more funding" " Poor literacy costs the economy money" "Literacy education goes hand in hand with social change" and other slogans and exhortations. It appears there are many organizations committed to literacy learning, and they attract a lot of funding. "Advocacy" would appear to be one of their main activities. (See also the website of the National Coalition for Literacy.)

93 million people out of 300 some odd million or so Americans would benefit from literacy instruction. Wow! You cannot accommodate these people in class rooms. That has to be close to half of all adults in the US!

I suspect that most "literacy programs" do not have much of an impact. Based on my experience with language learning I suspect that literacy teaching is no more effective than language teaching.

I am convinced that LingQ would help, at very little cost. I have not been successful in interesting anyone in the literacy establishment because they are more motivated by advocacy than in finding solutions that can be more effective and less costly. I have asked them to look at LingQ to see if it could be adapted to the needs of the literacy campaign. I have told them that it could be used free of charge. I have been told in no uncertain terms that they are not interested because I am "for profit" and/or because I do not have the requisite academic credentials.

Learning the language in the country where it is spoken

I live in France (for 4 years) but am having trouble learning French...

This is the title of a thread at one of our Forums at LingQ and starts with the common complaint of someone who lives where the language is spoken but cannot learn the language as well as he would like.

I am going to post here my own comments on this thread.

First of all some facts from my experience,

1) Just being surrounded by the language will not enable you to learn. It takes a deliberate effort.
2) You need to build up your ability to understand what is said. That is the first goal, not to speak. For the time being your ability to speak is not important, just accept it as it is.
3) You need words, lots of words. You cannot use a word actively, until it has been a part of your passive vocabulary for a while.
4) It is normal to forget what you learn. I can be considered a good language learner and forget most words that I learn.
5) You need to listen at least 1 hour a day, and at first listen more than once to the same content.
6) Read the text of what you are listening to. You need both aural and visual exposure to the language at first.
7) Save or "LingQ" words and phrases that you either do not understand or want to be able to use. This will automatically create flash cards.
8) Review your flash cards regularly to help you notice them when you listen and read.
9) Kids learn better mostly because they are not anxious about their learning. Take it easy and try to find a way to enjoy your learning.
10) If I were lucky enough to live on Corsica I would be going for walks in the countryside and listening to interesting content on my iPod, but in my case it would be Russian or Portuguese,but it would not matter.

Someone suggested just listening to the radio even if one does not understand, like a child.

I do not recommend spending much time listening to things you do not understand. Having learned 11 languages I can tell you from experience you are better off spending your time listening to content that you have a chance to understand, where you understand at lest 50% and eventually 75% and are struggling to learn more. You listen more than once, read,and mine this material for words and phrases that you can start to "own", to understand in different contexts and eventually to use.

You can play the radio in the background, or watch TV for fun, but the learning of the language requires a more deliberate strategy.

The child focuses on bits of the language that are important to it, and typically that is a limited range of content. The brain is able to prioritize things to learn (read Spitzer) and shut out things that are not yet important or relevant. Eventually the range gets larger and larger.

That is why it is important, as a foreign language learner, to focus on content that is interesting and meaningful. That means having some of the vocabulary, hopefully being familiar with the subject, and a relatively non-frustrating way of acquiring more of the vocabulary.

Nothing wrong with having the radio on, but it is not going to do much for you in my experience. Being with native speakers can be a high-resonance situation if you take it as an opportunity to listen and learn and do not worry about your own performance. You will know when you are comfortable speaking up, meanwhile just build up your language power through listening and reading and do not allow yourself to become frustrated.

Someone described her own experience at LingQ, where for the first time she tried to study without a through study of the grammar. She was surprised at how suddenly the language  became clearer.

You have mirrored my experience. You do not deliberately learn in the sense that you study something and then "own" it. It is not a matter of direct cause and effect. You just try to do things that will fill your brain with useful bits of information and experience and the brain will put it all together on its own terms. When you least expect it you will notice that you understood something more easily than before, or that a phrase that you learned long ago has suddenly popped into your mind. On the other hand you will suddenly find yourself unable to remember a simple word that you felt you already "owned".

Through it all, mysteriously, the language becomes a part of you.

One of the strangest things is that when you spend time on a third language, you end up doing better on your second language.

It is quite mysterious. That is what is wrong with language teaching, where the expectations that things that were taught will be learned, and should be tested, just because they were taught.

If I were a classroom teacher using LingQ

How to use LingQ in the classroom? Here is my answer to the email I posted earlier.

If I were a classroom teacher using LingQ I would set out seven principles and seven requirements.

Seven principles.

1) You have to understand a language well before you can hope to speak it well.

2) The best way to learn to understand is to do a lot of listening and reading, the main activities in language learning. Your hours of listening and words of reading are the key measurable activities.

3) To understand what you listen to and read, you need to learn many words. The number of words you know is the most important measurable achievement.

4) What you do outside the classroom is much more important than what you do in the classroom.

5) You will learn much better if you enjoy your listening and reading. Find things of interest to listen to and read.

6) When you speak and write in the language you should make mistakes, even repeat the same mistakes.

7) If you notice your mistakes, and think about them, you will start to notice the language better when you listen and read. Slowly you will start to communicate better.

Seven requirements.

1) You are all obliged to achieve the weekly LingQ targets in you profile. We can all see each other's profile. There will be recognition for the learners with highest Activity Index every week.

2) You are free to read and listen to whatever you want in order to meet your targets. I will also be assigning specific required items for study, in addition.

3) We will discuss the assigned items in class. At the end of the class I will draft a list of all the misused words and phrases. These will be posted on a website to be downloaded and imported as content into LingQ.

4) You will write one submission per week. You can write answers to my questions on the assigned items, or you can write freely about subjects that interest you. You will import the corrected writing into LingQ and save the words and phrases that caused you trouble. 

5) Every three months you will select your best 3 writing assignments, and import them into a collection in LingQ to be called My Writing Portfolio. This is a record of your improving ability to express yourself. 

6) Every three months you will also record an answer to an oral question, which will also be added to your Portfolio.

7) Every three months there will be a computer based cloze test on your known words in LingQ.  Only if you score over 95%, wiill your LingQ known words total be considered confirmed. Your profile and cloze test results will be part of your profile.  Your Portfolio will form the basis for your grade at the end of the year.