Homework for Instructed Language Learning

Recently, a note to parents from a second grade teacher in Texas went viral. Instead of doing homework, the teacher urged parents to let kids play, to eat dinner with their kids, and to read to their kids. You can read the whole note on Facebook.

This teacher's sentiment seems to reflect a growing trend in American K-12 education, according to the NPR article linked at the beginning of this post. For language teachers, what does a move away from homework mean? After all, many language courses involve lots of take-home grammar worksheets and vocabulary exercises. At more advanced levels, language learners are commonly asked to do writing assignments or prepare presentations as homework.

Although it might be tempting to jump on the no-homework train and never look back, the issue of homework in language classes cannot be approached without considering learner age, instructional context, and class time.

First, children tend to be different than adults when it comes to language learning. Even putting aside debates about the critical period hypothesis (or sensitive period) and ignoring how the internal mechanisms for language acquisition might be different, any language teacher who has experience teaching both children and adults can tell you about some major differences in emotional and cognitive maturity. Simply put, young children are not likely to get much out of rule-based grammar worksheets, in-class or at home. Some would argue that older learners are not likely to get much out of them either, but at the very least they should be able to complete such exercises.

Second, instructional context matters. In a context where the target language is spoken widely outside of school, students may get less benefits from doing language homework. Heck, for children especially, sitting at their desk for an hour a night doing grammar worksheets is going to be far less beneficial than going to the park to play with friends who speak the target language. For adults, coffee with friends is also likely to be of help. But in environments where the target language is not spoken, a teacher creating some out-of-class obligation to use the target language, and provide materials for it, could very well be crucial to a learner's success. In those environments, flipped classrooms for older language learners are attractive: instead of spending class time on grammar lectures or running through a list of new vocabulary, those can be done at home in advance and class time can be packed full of good input and communication- the things that are much harder to get outside of the classroom for foreign language learners.

Finally, class time should be a major consideration in the decision to abandon homework. Language learning requires input, and getting lots of input translates into a vast amount of time. There really is no "one easy trick" or hack to learn a language quickly, even though good instruction can make the slow process appreciably quicker. So your 2-4 hours a week of Spanish in a high school class is not likely to be sufficient for developing a modest degree of communicative competence in the language- more input and opportunities for meaningful language use is needed. On the other hand, if students are getting 4+ hours per day of instruction, the benefits of homework might be diminished (I say might because in language learning, more input is universally a good thing), especially when exposure to the target language is easy to get outside of the classroom for social or entertainment purposes. Also, for child second language learners (e.g., recent immigrants), it may be just as worthwhile to maintain the first language and work on first language literacy at home, as we know that literacy skills transfer across languages (assuming that one has achieved some degree of competence in whatever additional language).

With those three considerations out of the way, the question of what kind of language homework deserves attention. So far I've alluded to the idea that grammar worksheets are not especially helpful, especially for children but I generally hold the same to be true for adults (they're not necessarily harmful, and in small doses may indeed be useful, but we have to think about opportunity costs and relative importance). Here's where the teacher's note to parents holds particularly good (though perhaps unintentional) advice for language teachers: "eat dinner as a family, read together, play outside." While this can be hard for parents if they do not also speak the target language, the principle that social and pleasurable language use (dinner conversation, reading books) is helpful should not be overlooked. In English language teaching, a lot of work has been done on extensive reading and the practice, which involves reading linguistically-appropriate texts for pleasure, has generally been shown to be effective in terms of vocabulary learning and reading fluency. In other areas, research has found language benefits for socializing online, living with host families during study abroad (dinner conversations, anyone?), and even participating in online gaming communities. Regardless of whether you overtly assign these sorts of activities or not, this is generally what you really want your students to be doing with the language outside of class rather than studying grammar rules. However, I should mention that some explicit language study can be helpful, especially for vocabulary: spending some time studying word lists and completing exercises that require some engagement with words have been shown to be effective and efficient for establishing at least some types of word knowledge.

So as with most things, there are shades of gray when it comes to homework. Some focused, empirically-based and hopefully limited homework that focuses on language features can be helpful in certain situations (consider your learners' age, learning context, and class time). But in general, the important thing is for learners to spend lots of time getting meaningful input and communicating, as assigned homework or not.

PSLLT 2016 - Day 1

Live from lovely Calgary, here are some brief thoughts on the first day of the 8th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference:

- Great representation of non-English languages. Kyujin and I presented on Korean, and we saw presentations/posters on Chinese, German, and Russian (and that's not a comprehensive list).

- As would be expected given the conference theme, lots of interesting work being done incorporating tech. I'm particularly impressed with how corpus and NLP techniques are being utilized in pronunciation-focused projects.

- Ultrasound in pronunciation had 3 papers. Still strikes me as somewhat impractical, but the papers were presenting some really neat ideas and I'll b3 looking forward to seeing those lines of work develop.

- Is there a tension between pushes for individualized pronunciation instruction/training and greater classroom integration?

- It's been suggested that perception and pronunciation development sometimes requires some explicit instruction and drilling (i.e., HVPT). I wouldn't disagree that that approach can be effective. But does pronunciation instruction need to exclude non-phonological aspects of language learning? In other words, can we have a primary focus on pronunciation that might benefit language ability more holistically?