A few reflections on being back in the language classroom again- as a student

This summer, I had the great privilege of spending 200 hours over the course of 10 weeks in an intensive Korean program in Seoul (thanks to Michigan State University Asian Studies Center's Foreign Language and Area Studies summer fellowship program!). Ever since I started learning Korean at the age of ~23, I have craved opportunities to devote (most of) my attention to learning Korean, rather than squeeze in bits of self-study and chats with my wife or friends here and there.

Aside from noticeably improving my knowledge of and ability in Korean, I also find that being a full-time(-ish, more on this later) student is great for reflecting on language teaching and learning. Here are a few reflections that have stuck with me:

• Obligation is a Good Thing: Maybe one of the biggest things I get out of language classes is the obligation to show up, participate, do homework, etc. Outside of language classes, it is incredibly easy to just not use the language, and this can be true whether you are in an immersion setting or in foreign language setting. Hell, I'm married to a speaker of my target language, but because she speaks English incredibly well, it affords me the opportunity to be lazy. And I take that opportunity much more than I should. This summer I had to schlep 1.5 hours each way across Seoul for my 5-days-a-week classes, during morning rush hour. It was not always a fun commute, but I would do it again in a heartbeat. Having an obligation to learn and use the language is key. In my research on online language learning platforms, this is often the biggest missing element.
• I am 99.99999% in favor of Target Language Only classrooms: With all due respect to translanguaging/plurilingualism/plurilingual repertoires/etc., in a language-focused classroom there's nothing quite like near-exclusive use of the target language. Having to struggle through your misunderstandings and botched expression pushes you to recall words and structures as you re-work things. Asking for help or clarification in the TL in the classroom prepares you to do the same outside of the classroom. I relished being the only L1 English speaker in my class this summer. There were multiple Vietnamese and Chinese speakers, who all made great efforts to stick to Korean during class, which I really appreciated. Occasionally, though, there would be a side-huddle among some shared L1 speakers... which was a little jarring, honestly. Everyone else just had to sit and wait! Luckily my classmates were very kind about reporting back to the group in Korean. 
• Bilingual Dictionaries: Oh, right, that .00001%? I fully support individual use of bilingual (electronic/web) dictionaries. Especially as vocabulary gets more advanced and abstract. It's just such a huge time saver and I found my understanding of Korean words was better after a few seconds looking at definitions and examples in the KOR-ENG Naver dictionary. In some cases, teacher explanations led to confusions for me, likely due to my own deficiencies in lexical knowledge. 
• Meaningful Communication - 말처럼 쉽지 않다 ("Not as easy as saying it"): The program I attended prides itself on it's communicative focus, and in many ways, they get it right. For example, we had an assignment where were gave a little presentation on a news article and then presented three topically related questions for whole-class discussion. This was probably my favorite week in class- we spent so much time talking about current events in Korea and elsewhere that we were genuinely interested in, and using grammar and vocabulary we had learned came naturally when we needed it. On the other hand, I think it is still common pedagogical practice to also spend a fair amount of time doing the whole "go around the room and have everyone make a sentence using the target grammar structure." This does involve speaking, but it's not really meaningful or contextualized communication. It also means no one else is talking!
• Language students can have a lot on their plates: I hinted at this previously, but even though you might be enrolled full-time in an intensive language program, you might end up having a lot of other responsibilities to deal with. In my case, I had some work scoring essays and teaching an online class. I also became a father! Some of my classmates were putting in lots of hours at part-time jobs to support themselves. This kind of stuff makes it hard to do homework/projects as well as you'd like, and can negatively impact your sleep schedule, too. Some students do kind of get to "live the dream" where they have lots of time to study class material and really take advantage of immersion/social opportunities, but not everyone gets to do that. This really made me think about the expectations we have for international students in intensive English programs back home. Many are young and on generous scholarships, but not all of them. On the teaching side of things, I think that means we should really do our best to take advantage of class time, such as creating opportunities to write or work on presentations in class (with teacher and peer support!), and perhaps not assign too much weight to "busywork" like workbook pages that are so easy to just assign as homework.

Well, I could probably go on and on, but I'll stop here. These were some of the bigger thoughts floating around in my head since finishing the class last week. Even though a little negativity slipped in to those reflections, it was overall a really positive experience and I'm already looking forward to my next chance to be a language student.

(Good) Academic Writing is Hard in an L1 or L2

Academic writing is hard, in the sense that it's laborious and requires carefully following lots of rules (e.g., APA, Chicago, MLA). It's also hard in the sense that you're generally writing about fairly complex subject matter, as opposed to typing up a recipe to share on Pinterest or an e-mail about an office party. Good academic writing is the next tier of difficulty- you have to manage the complex subject matter and adhere to all of the rules and communicate your ideas clearly, concisely (oh, word limits...), and stylishly. If good writing was easy, the argument goes, there wouldn't be so many books on advanced/professional/academic writing (see Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword and The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker for particular good examples of such books).

The difficulty inherent to good academic writing is obvious and uncontroversial. The issue becomes a bit more complicated when you throw second languages into the mix. My initial reaction was that academic writing in a second language must be more difficult than academic writing in a first language. It would seem reasonable, then, that getting academic writing published in a second language is harder than in a first language. In other words, first language writers have a substantial advantage in academic publishing. However, this might not be the case. As Ken Hyland (2016) argued, there are important differences between acquiring a language and learning to write in a language, and there is little data that would suggest second language writers are disadvantaged when it comes to getting published.

Hyland pointed out that first language writers must learn to write (and write well); they do not acquire writing. The learning/acquisition distinction is key here. Acquiring a first language (i.e., the process virtually every human goes through as a very young child) confers fully-developed linguistic competence that requires virtually no deliberate studying- it's just something you inherit. Learning a language, or a specific language skill, on the other hand, is effortful, not always successful, and rarely complete. For many people around the world, English is learned rather than acquired. However, for any English user, writing, academic or otherwise, is also learned: success is not guaranteed and most writers have substantial room to improve. We all need teachers and mentors to show us the ropes of formal academic writing and the particulars of writing for a particular discipline: I certainly didn't simply acquire APA referencing conventions or good thesis sentences!

In terms of publishing dis/advantages, Hyland argued that there is little evidence suggesting language alone is responsible for publishing success, and pointed to other factors, such as institutional support, research/writing experience, and research relevance. He also pointed out that non-native scholars do get published in leading journals quite regularly- in top physics journals, for example, about 70% of first authors have English as an L2. Presenting L2 academic writers as disadvantaged only serves to demoralize L2 writers and potentially causes challenges faced by novice L1 academic writers  (and novice L2 academic writers, I'd argue) to be overlooked.

Like some of the interviewees in Hyland's article, I've heard comments from L2 writers that L2 academic writing is more comfortable than L1 academic writing, largely because they have only ever had to write academic text in the L2 and received minimal instruction in academic writing in their L1. I've even heard similar comments about giving academic presentations, which is perhaps more surprising. As a novice L1 academic writer, I can definitely see what Hyland is saying about the need for training and support- even though I usually get positive feedback about my writing quality, I still make errors and produce murky sentences and paragraphs quite regularly. Luckily, my advisor and other professors in my program give me feedback on this, as do anonymous journal reviewers (who might guess that I'm an L1 writer, but have no way of knowing for sure). My advisor also gave me copies of the Sword and Pinker books on good writing, which I've found to be very helpful- I'd recommend both to anyone who wants to improve their writing.

Despite the persuasiveness of Hyland's arguments, I can't quite shake the belief that L2 academic writing is harder than L1 academic writing. This difference in difficulty might not result in differences in publication success, as writers generally have ample time and sometimes support for fine-tuning a manuscript before submission, but I still would imagine that the process of getting words on the page is more arduous. That, in and of itself, could be quite demoralizing. For me, even rudimentary translation into Korean and simplistic compositions are slow going, so I can hardly imagine churning out pages of academic prose in an L2. Much respect to those who do!

Any L2 writers care to share their thoughts?

An Alexa for language learning

https://www.cnet.com/news/this-little-robot-is-your-new-language-learning-buddy/

This actually sounds kind of neat, particularly the pronunciation correction. It's not going to replace teachers, but could be nice for additional practice or for people self-studying without much opportunity for interaction and output.

I kind of want one...

The Brain and (Adult) Language Learning

Some interesting work has come out recently that examines brain activity and language learning, mostly in adults. This straddles conventional neurolinguistics/cognitive science and second language acquisition, and I think this is an important and hopefully productive area of inquiry. However, some of this work is very exploratory- or pioneering, to use more positive phrasing (which I think is deserved!).

A recent piece on the Scientific American website highlighted a couple recent studies, one of which I read a few months ago. The headline reads as follows:

Some People’s Brains Are Wired for Languages 

Brain scans may offer clues to a person’s natural aptitude—and help those less gifted learn how to study better

I found this title to go a bit too far, mainly because the studies reviewed do not necessarily speak to a specific language learning aptitude, and the operationalization and measurement of language learning in the studies is somewhat lacking.

For example, in the first study in the SA article (Qi et al., 2015), Mandarin learning was predicted by right hemisphere measures (basically, differences in the structure of white matter). Mandarin learning is based on a classroom Listening/Reading/Speaking test, a pinyin dictation task, and a vocabulary test. Few details were provided about the classroom test, other than that it was presented mostly in Mandarin (so Chinese characters?) and scored by the teacher. Part of me likes the inclusion of the classroom test, which brings in some communicative skills- it's also reflective of real-world language learning and outcomes that people care about. But often, teacher-made and scored classroom tests focus on discrete bits and highly-practiced materials- so studying the night before (or in the 10 minutes before class) could be just as influential on results as actual acquisition of linguistic forms and development of communicative competence. The dictation task required students to write 10 (yes, just ten) words/phrases in pinyin, a phonetic script with Latin letters. The obvious confound here is that pinyin knowledge could be confounded with Mandarin phonetic discrimination. The vocabulary test involved 30 words presented in English (how often were these words presented in the curriculum?) and a choice of two Chinese characters, one of which was a correct translation and the other a similar-looking character (imagine choosing between star and stare in English)- so, a 50% chance to get it right just by guessing. Scores for the latter two measures were percent correct. To some extent, the limited coverage of the learning measures understandably reflects the limited learning experience in the study (60ish hours of classroom learning). It could be that the brain measures relate to a general analytic capacity/phonetic discrimination capacity rather than language learning/aptitude for language learning, and the psychometric properties of the tests potentially introduce a fair amount of noise on top of that.

The second study (link here) French learning was predicted (substantially- 60% of variance explained) by resting EEG readings. French learning was operationalized by progress through an interactive/game-based French learning course (about 8 or so hours worth of study, from what I can tell). The course actually sounds really cool (for lack of a better word)- you have to carry out real-world-esque tasks in a virtual French immersion environment. But progress through a self-paced language course could be based as much on personality and general analytic/reasoning skills as an aptitude for SLA. In the SA article, one of the study authors admits as much, which was nice to see. In a Duolingo project I've worked on (as a participant-researcher), I outpaced a few colleagues in learning Turkish, but that alone doesn't mean I actually acquired more Turkish. The authors did get a bunch of general cognitive measures from the participants, none of which had significant correlations- which could be support for the resting EEG having a meaningful connection with language learning, or it could just be the case that not many correlations are going to be significant when you have 16 people.

Although I'm critical here, I do think there's a lot of potential in this work. I definitely think these authors are on to something, but I hope future work can clarify what that is- and on the language side, better-defined and operationalized measures of linguistic competence/communicative ability could be a great help.

"Arrival" is a really positive representation of linguistics and language learning

Arrival is a fantastic piece of science fiction. 12 (peaceful) alien spaceships arrive on earth, and a linguist is recruited to establish communication while the world at large slips into fear and panic. I will try to avoid spoilers here- go see it for yourself. But consider this a review of how the film portrays linguistics, linguists, and foreign language learning. I'll cover pros and cons:

PROS:

• The complexity of language is presented with major importance to the plot. For example, Amy Adams' character has to explain how linguistically complicated the interrogative "What is your purpose on Earth?" to an Air Force general who sees it as one simple question composed of 6 words.
• Linguistics is presented as science, and fights for equal standing along hard sciences. Jeremy Renner's character is a NSF scientist (chemist? physicist?) who is initially a bit dismissive of linguistics, making a distinction between language and science. But he is won over, and ends up being Adams' supporter. 
• Interaction. Adams needs to interact directly with the aliens in order for there to be any way for her to learn their language/teach them ours. Interaction is key in language learning! 
• Language teaching and learning is presented pretty positively. We get to see Adams' character providing comprehensible input to the aliens, using gestures and actions to illustrate concepts. She has to start with extremely simple messages, and gradually works up from there. Communication is important to the whole process.
• Written language. The alien writing system is key for humans learning the language, and I think this is a nice parallel to the real world, where written language can provide a huge boon to foreign language learning, especially for adults. Some would argue that for adults in non-immersion contexts, it's really the ease of accessing a particular writing system that determines the difficulty of learning another language. The classic example is Mandarin being especially difficult for Anglophones, even though Mandarin is really no more or less complex than French (of course, cognate vocabulary also plays a role).

CONS:

• Louise Banks (the linguist played by Amy Adams) speaks a lot of languages, and can interpret to English in real-time. While it's not a bad thing at all to have Anglophone movie characters demonstrate multilingual abilities, it nonetheless reinforces the popular conception of a linguist as someone who knows many languages.
• Just about the only linguistic theory mentioned by name is Sapir-Whorf. This is actually somewhat of a key plot point, so I can forgive it on that account, but in the real world the idea that the language you speak shapes how you think and experience the world has been largely debunked. There are only very slight differences in processing information across languages, and these amount to arguably negligible differences when it comes to forming a worldview.

All in all, this is the movie you tell friends to watch if you want them to get a basic sense of what linguistics is- it's not perfect, but I think it's better than linguists-as-accent-coaches in My Fair Lady. It's also a well-crafted, entertaining movie otherwise. I think I'm going to have to check out director Denis Villeneuve's other work!

Language Learning and Pokémon Go (and mobile gaming/apps more generally)

Reality augmented with purple rats... purple rats everywhere!

Everyone is talking about Pokémon Go, the new Augmented Reality (AR) mobile game from Nintendo and Niantic Labs. National Public Radio is posting articles and talking about it on the radio! Go to any college campus or high-volume public space and you'll see why: people are walking around with their smartphones, pausing every few steps to catch the little critters. Language teachers aren't oblivious to Pokémon Go's popularity, and they're talking about it, too- (how) could Pokémon Go be used to support language learning?


In the specific case of Pokémon Go, I do not see much potential for language learning. The game itself lacks chat or messaging functions, so no in-game interaction with other speakers of your target language. Also, the game is pretty simple, and there's not a large quantity or variety of text- you would become familiar with the meaning of few messages and words/phrases pretty quickly, and ultimately there's not a lot of input provided by the game. On a side note, even after setting my phone and Google account to my target language, I couldn't get the game to display in Korean. I would say that the biggest potential for language learning with Pokémon Go is its ability to provide face-to-face interaction opportunities with a variety of speakers. In my experience so far playing, I've had a number of short chats with strangers, all quite pleasant. For a language learner on a college campus, the game could be a fantastic icebreaker that sparks some authentic, meaningful communication, which is key for language learning. This aspect of playing the game could be very helpful for international students who are shy or have trouble connecting with domestic student peers on campus.

Beyond Pokémon Go, I'm more interested in the underlying technology behind AR and context-sensitive applications. While displaying purple rats in random locations does not hold much promise for language learning, displaying useful phrases for sending a package when you get near a post office does. Especially if, let's say, you could "catch" the words or phrases that were new to you for flashcard-study later (the app could also remember to display those words prominently the next time you get near a post office). Apps could also keep up with your reading, listening, and/or viewing habits, and suggest articles/songs/videos of interest in a target language you have indicated you wish to learn when you're at home in the evening... and imagine if you could take a vocabulary size test periodically to help the app select appropriate material for you? I think functions like these are the future of language learning games and apps- useful resources keyed in to meaningful contexts good learning habits.