Learning as Fitness

An idea has been forming in the back of my head for a few weeks now.  So far, it's only managed to become half-formed and a bit nebulous, but I think it has potential to become a fully-formed idea at some point.  At that point I'll be able to speculate as to whether or not it is any good:

"Learning as 'popular fitness'"

Now, fitness is this huge Thing at the moment, and there is this phenomenon where people are happy to take weird little pieces of advice that they get out of magazines and apply them to their bodies.  

We have 6 week exercise plans designed to take you from flabby couch-potato to person-who-can-run - all based around the idea of setting aside a certain time on a certain day to do a certain activity because the piece of paper said so.

We have circuit training, where people have a list of little exercises that are repeated multiple times (because the piece of paper said so).

We have fitness trainers who give tips on shaking up your workouts and diet advice and what have you, and we think about this advice and let it shape the way we approach our lives (because the piece of paper said so).

What if we applied that to learning?  What if we had a 6 week plan which asked you to spend 20-40 minutes each day for six weeks (plus two scheduled rest days each week) doing a number of exercises/activities - starting with short, easy activities and building up towards longer, more sustained activities?

What if we had some sheets of "circuit training" routines where we would repeat simple, basic exercises in a set pattern (six minutes of flash-cards, six minutes of close tests, six minutes of tongue-twisters, then repeat)?

What if we regularly read pithy little bits of advice from people who know how to learn, and took it on in the same "hey, that's a good idea" manner that we have when reading running magazines and the like?

Would we (could we) learn better by following advice the same way we exercise better by letting the piece of paper keep us on track?

If we started treating our brains the same way we treat our bodies (when we're treating them like "well-oiled-machines"), what would happen?

My Language Learning Experiences

Some of this may be a bit repetative for anyone who usually reads this blog, but this particular post is for an assignment I'm working on, so please forgive anything particularly boring

My first “formal” experience of learning a foreign language was in high school, where we had two years of Indonesian classes (Bahasa Indonesia).  These classes were taught by a science teacher who had lived in Indonesia for a few years.  Most of the kids in the class were not there because of a burning desire to learn Indonesian.  Some of us wanted to learn a language, and it was the only one on offer, others simply wanted to avoid Geography, which was the only other subject that could be done at the same time.  We learnt very little Indonesian, largely due to the fact that our hearts weren’t really in it – neither the students’, nor the school’s.  The school clearly offered this particular language because they thought they could get away with offering a language subject without hiring another, specialist teacher.

In my senior years of high school there were no language courses offered (our Indonesian speaking science teacher had left), and I decided to put myself through an evening French course.  This was a completely different style of learning (especially for a 16 year old) and I probably learnt more French in those 12 weeks than I had learnt Indonesian in the two years at school – but it was expensive.  I could only afford the one course (and my family had no interest in supporting what they saw as a waste of time and money – why would I need a language other than English?  Couldn’t I take up a more useful hobby?).  Perhaps, if I had been taught how to learn languages independently, I would have been able to continue studying in my own time using books and course materials borrowed from the library.

I could have studied languages in university, but there were a few different things I wanted to do, and I couldn’t do them all…  In the end, I chose to study English in more depth rather than any other language.  Clearly my intrinsic motivation wasn’t up to the challenge of learning a language at the time.

Ten years later I decided to learn Estonian, which is something of a heritage language for me.  I spent a year or so trying to learn on my own with a couple of text books, then I found a tutor.  Shortly afterwards, I decided to learn German as well (it’s more useful than Estonian), and I started by taking a couple of evening courses (like the French course all those years ago), to prepare me for enrolling in a distance language degree.  For the past two years I have been studying German through the Diploma of Modern Languages course in UNE.  This pretty much involves teaching myself using a text-book package and having the occasional contact with some teacher – unfortunately, mostly for assessment purposes.  The first semester, when I could attend the moodle-based tutorials, it went quite well.  But when you are learning completely asynchronously you get no “play time”, no feedback and no practical correction (you don’t get the correction in time for it to be formative, you only find out what you could do better after you’ve submitted an assessment piece).

Contrast this with my private studies for Estonian.  Even though we were studying via Skype, and there are some limitations, I had one-on-one work with a knowledgeable “coach” who could give me feedback and correction as I played with the language.  I then attended a two week intensive course, and I have to say the combination of guided private study plus intensive course has been the most successful language learning balance I have undertaken. 

Feedback is awesome.  Being able to talk and interact with other learners is not needed every day, but is also awesome.

From my own experiences, my recipe for the best language learning “environment” goes a little something like this:

1.  Students should want to learn that language, and teachers should want to teach it

2.  Students should be taught how to “teach” languages, so that they can do more of the heavy lifting themselves

3.  Teachers/tutors should regularly talk to/play with students, giving feedback as they go along (and not basing all feedback around assessment items)

4.  Some contact with a) other learners, and b) native speakers

5.  A stick and a carrot.

A little more on point 5 is warranted:  The one thing my DipModLang *is* providing me (which I didn’t get from private study or evening courses) that I find most valuable is the deadlines.  There are many tasks I know would be good for me, but I just don’t get around to doing them.  When I know I *have to* do them and hand them in by a set date, I tend to be less lazy about these things.  I just wish the tasks I was being “encouraged” to complete would be less we-have-to-mark-you-on-something and more this-is-going-to-make-you-a-better-communicator.

What should a teacher bring to a language class?  His/her coaching kit – show us how to teach ourselves, then give us plenty of exercise, feedback and encouragement.

What should a learner bring to a language class?  His/her will to win (if we stick with the metaphor).  A learner should be wanting to play, willing to “skill up” and happy to fake-it-until-you-make-it.

Or, to use keywords from the literature, a successful language class needs a combination of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation, Autonomous Learning, Autonomous Teaching, Social Interaction, Feedback, Washback and Opportunities for Authentic Learning Activities/Experiences/Applications.

 

Keeping it Short

I'm currently studying a subject looking at the "modern" German Short Story.  I've been looking forward to taking this subject since I enrolled in the course back in 2011, so I'm determined to see this one out even if I might not finish the degree (there's a bitter and twisted story behind why I might not finish the degree - but suffice to say that the bureaucracy of the university has made it impossible for me to finish this year, and I had no intention of working on it next year).

I love short stories, but hardly ever seem to read them.  I'll go through a phase of reading three or four short stories in a couple of days, and then not read another for a year or more.  I have many anthologies of short stories decorating my bookshelves at home (much like my vast and mostly untouched books of poetry and plays) and I refuse to part with them because I love short stories... but somehow this doesn't translate to reading them as often as I would expect.

I love short stories for completeness of them.  These tiny little jewels can give you a head-long rush into another world, and then finish the story and leave you standing on the other side of the bridge - all within a single evening.  They tell the kinds of stories that novels can't tell well - and I have read many a novel that should have been a short story.  When they are written well, they are very similar to poetry.  The language just sings; the ideas are whole and complete, well-wrapped packages.  I think the tightness of the form lends itself to people taking the kind of care with their language that would get tiresome in a full-length book.

However, I think it's also the completeness of them that helps me to ignore them for so long.  A novel strings you along so that you keep reading (sometimes, long after you've stopped caring).  You can quite easily and happily read one short story and stop.

Short stories don't have the same level of fame as their longer cousins.  I could name a few you might have heard of:  The Yellow Wallpaper, The Tell-tale Heart, The Adventure of the Speckled Band, The Union Buries It's Dead, The Incident at Owl Creek Bridge...  However, very few short stories will ever get the street cred of Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre.

I also find the 19th Century short story (and the early 20th Century short story) so much more interesting than the "modern" short story (those written after 1950).  In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, the short story was the television of it's day.  People bought and read magazines like The Strand, which were mixtures of serialised novels and short stories.  Our good friend Sherlock Holmes was one of the few enduring success stories from the non-novel side of things.  After radio and TV came along to plug that gap, the short story genre seemed to be handed over to the "serious" writers - artsy types writing for a "literate" audience.  Only speculative fiction and sci-fi seemed to carry the torch for populist short stories.

With, of course, a few notable exceptions.  James Herriot, anyone?

And, though I must admit it isn't always the most stimulating read in the world, I do admire The People's Friend magazine for keeping the flag flying.

Many of the short stories you find yourself reading for literature classes are rather silted and depressing, which probably does the genre no good at all.  Reading "literary" short stories makes me hanker for the fun stuff.  Give me a good collection of detective or ghost stories any day of the week.

Speaking of, I wonder if my library still has the works of M.R. James floating around...

Economics of Language Choice and Conlangs

Back in 1998 Abram de Swaan wrote a fascinating two-piece article for the journal Language Problems and Language Planning called  "A Political Sociology of the World Language System (1): The Dynamics of Language Spread" and "A Political Sociology of the World Language System (2): The Unequal Exchange of Texts".

The central argument of these articles is that people choose what second language to learn based on similar "economic" considerations that they would use to choose what telecommunications network to join (or, in modern terms, what operating system to throw themselves into).

He talked about languages having a Q-value, which is the desirability of the language based on the number of native speakers and the number of people who already speak it as a second language.  When choosing a second language to learn, most people go for one that will give them the most communicative bang for their buck, in other words.

If you lived in an area where most people spoke their own indigenous language or Dutch, you would see Dutch as being an attractive option, because it would give you a greater number of other people to communicate with.  Dutch is the center of a language constellation in that region, and has a high Q-value.  However, Dutch is but a planet circling the sun in the larger constellation where the big shiny language is German.  You might decide that German is therefore more attractive.

The biggest and shiniest language of them all is, of course, English - if for no other reason than the sheer numbers of people who speak it as a second language.  However, your personal needs in your local area might lead you to choose the big, shiny language in your smaller constellation, simply because you think you, personally, will speak to more people and have a greater supply of texts in that way.

Basically, de Swaan argues that people want consumer confidence in whatever language they choose to learn in addition to their own.

The thing that struck me about his argument, although it seemed to slip de Swaan's attention completely, is how this applies to constructed or planned languages.  He did give them a passing glance, but only to point out that artificial languages to exist, not to note that the consumer argument that he had observed for natural languages applied even more-so to those that have been constructed.

How many constructed/auxiliary languages have come and gone over the years?  The big winners in the game are the ones that look like they have legs - if you know what I mean.  Klingon has an army of geeks making sure it survives, and Esperanto has numbers.  The numbers make it more attractive to anyone who might be thinking of taking up an auxiliary language instead of, say, French or Spanish.

There was, at some point, a bit of a Betamax vs VHS thing happening between Volapük and Esperanto.  Esperanto won that consumer battle.  Now people learning an auxiliary language can choose between Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua if they want an IAL spoken by more than four people - and even then, Esperanto has the numbers.

I know one of the reasons why I'm learning Esperanto* is consumer confidence.  There are, depending on your sources, somewhere between 50,000 and 2 million speakers, and the language has been around for 125 years.  I have previously suggested that it was only mildly more useful, as a second language, than Welsh - but I've changed my mind on that point.  I have some faith that learning Esperanto is not going to be a complete waste of time.  I can't say I would feel the same about the other conlangs and IALs.

The consumer confidence element of language choice applies so very clearly to constructed and auxiliary languages it's staggering.  I'll have to see if someone has written a paper about it - I'd be very surprised if they haven't, but I have a strange feeling such a paper would probably be written in either Esperanto or Interlingua...



*I am learning Esperanto, but I'm doing it very slowly.  Don't expect posts in Esperanto any time soon.

LPLP

I've recently discovered the journal Language Problems & Language Planning - and, by "recently", I mean I noticed it sitting on our shelves ages ago but I have finally taken the time to see what kind of articles are inside it.

It's a highly interesting journal that is dedicated to the decisions people make about languages.

The stuff that comes out of our mouths on a day to day basis is reasonably free of official decisions (some would argue it is reasonably free of decisions, full stop), but there are a lot of official decisions to be made about the language we use in governments, schools and courts - not to mention the languages that need official support to survive.

China is trying to build an "improved" standard writing system.  The Dutch spelling system is apparently doomed to eternal conflict.  Cornish is trying to come back from the dead.  French Canadians are trying to make sure they can continue to have their own schools.  Minority languages all over the world are trying to gain recognition and support.  Esperanto is just plain interesting - and still kind of almost trying to change the world (but only subtly - much like Fabian Socialism*).

Multilingualism, bilingual education, multiculturalism and heritage languages that won't just lay down and die...

I have a habit of thinking about languages in terms of grammar and vocabulary (and sometimes philology and literature) - but the history and politics of languages can be incredibly fascinating, and that's what LPLP takes as its focus.

Some of the issues I've mentioned above might be a little less than topical.  For some reason I've started reading through the journal beginning with Volume 20 - from 1996.  I went to that volume to find an article referenced in a more current issue... and ended up staying for a while.

I'm finding the language climate of the late 1990s quite fascinating at the moment.  I've just finished reading a 1997 article on the kerfuffle over the 1994 attempted spelling reforms for Dutch.  Dirk Jacobs points out that the biggest problem with fixing spelling is the fact that professional writers (journalists, authors, etc) have a large stake in the issue and more clout in the public sphere than linguists can muster.  He concludes that spelling reform will only be able to happen if you get the journalists on-side first (and doubts that will be an easy thing to do).

I've had a few ideas challenged since I starting reading this journal.  One of the more recent articles, by Sabine Fiedler, drew my attention to the unquestioning respect we have for native speakers, and raised the point that a native speaker isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of a language.  That was an eye-opener.

It's a fascinating journal - and taking me on a fascinating journey.  I wonder if I'll keep travelling through the 1990s and 2000s.  I wonder what I'll learn along the way...




*-What do we want?
-Gradual change!
-When do we want it?
-In due course!

Jolly Hunter

Just playing with SoundCloud to see what can be done.  The following clip is a reading of "Jolly Hunter" by Charles Causely.

Slightly Foxed

I have previously mentioned my habit of subscribing to journals and magazines for a year to see if they are interesting enough to sustain my attention, and the fact that most of the time I end up wondering why I bothered.

There are various things that turn up in my mail box (my actual mail box) which produce a reaction much like this:

"Oh!  I have mail!  Oh.  It's only that."

Slightly Foxed is different. The fourth issue of my subscription turned up in my mail box a couple of weeks ago, and I felt happy for the rest of the day.

Have you ever had something arrive in the mail that actually made you clap your hands and say "Oh, good!"? Well that's what Slightly Foxed does for me.

I discovered this wonderful magazine by dint of a piece of paper that fell out of a copy of Literature Review, which I bought when I was trying to find Good Reading in a news agency that didn't have it.

I often find reading about books is much more achievable than reading the books themselves. Good Reading is a nice bit of fluff that's great for finding out what books are out there. Literature Review is like the book reviews you find in the "boffin" section of the Weekend papers - can be good, but can be a bit like hard work.

Slightly Foxed is just a nice read. It's a collection of essays about reading. The contributors talk about a book or an author or a movement that touched them in some way. Any given topic about books seems to be fair game. How Wind in the Willows shaped someone's childhood; What it was like running a subscription library out of a department store; what one particular series of out-of-print mountaineering books has to offer a reader lucky enough to find them...

The contributors are novelists, magazine editors, reporters, librarians... People from all over the place, and they are all writing about something they find quite interesting. This makes for a wonderfully eclectic collection of articles.  While I must admit that I don't read all of the articles immediately, I find I've usually read the entire issue by the time the next one arrives in my mail box.

The journal is run out of a bookshop in London - one that has taken to reprinting out of print books as well as their own quarterly collection of essays.  I expect I'll probably have to visit that shop if I ever go to London...

Oh, and the magazine is just lovely, physically. They use a buff coloured paper stock that feels wonderfully smooth to touch - and my first issue came tied up in a ribbon (seriously). You feel like these people really love books - not only the content, but also the form.

Slightly Foxed has become one of the few journals I have subscribed to for a second year - and, in a real first, I've actually bought a book as a result of reading one of the reviews.  A real book.  Brand new.  In hardcover.  It cost money.  This is not something I usually do.

I would happily recommend this publication to anyone who likes reading - especially if they like discovering works they've never heard of before.  It's a bit like sitting down with a group of bookish friends and asking the question "have you read any good books recently?"