"Horizon your broadens" - Where narrow exam prep goes wrong

"...horizon your broadens..."

While scoring essays for an English exam, I came across the above phrase, and I couldn't help but chuckle. To be clear, I generally do not find it appropriate to laugh at the efforts of L2 speakers, especially those made in the midst of a high-stakes exam, but this attempt at broaden your horizons, with its nearly-Spoonerism form, caught me off-guard. After regrouping and scoring the essay after a careful read, and then scoring a couple dozen more essays, this multiword unit lexical error stuck with me. In part, I think, because I see broaden your horizons so often in writing on English exams.

Why does broaden your horizons show up so much? What was going through the mind of the horizon your broadens author? What experiences and practices led him to this unfortunately and unintentionally humorous, infelicitous production?

There's actually a lot to unpack and reflect on here! 

To answer the first question: I would bet quite a bit of money that broaden your horizons comes up quite frequently in exam prep materials and courses. Although it might sound cliche to many, it is nonetheless idiomatic (indicating potentially sophisticated lexical knowledge and control) and kind of has a broad functional usefulness, at least when it comes to largely opinion-based writing- you can shoehorn broaden your horizons into a list of advantages for whatever you might be arguing for across many topics (Should people travel? Should people participate in local government? Should students pick their own majors? Should teens work part time jobs? What is the value of learning languages? etc. - you can work it in almost anywhere).

There's a lot of exam prep out there that focuses on essay templates, including sets of generally useful transitions (e.g., on the other hand), and broadly useful and sophisticated-sounding vocabulary that can be used in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., broaden your horizons). While learning these things isn't necessarily a waste of time in the bigger picture (good writers can use common rhetorical patterns and idiomatic vocabulary well in many different situations), a narrow and exclusive focus on just the language needed to squeak past an essay exam cutscore on a good day is what both language testers and teachers should hope to avoid.

Answering the second and third questions is harder. Maybe the writer had been cramming vocabulary in preparation for their big exam and simply gotten the form of this chunk mixed up? I know from personal experience it can be very easy to get things flipped around in L2 vocabulary. I'd imagine that the time pressure and stress of the exam may have made it harder for the writer to catch their mistake. They could have received very poor instruction or little useful feedback on practice essays, where I am sure that they would have attempted this phrase at least once before.

Washback is hard to get right. I know the testers behind this exam put in efforts to promote broad test prep - working on developing broadly useful and robust language skills - over narrow prep. But so much that leads into the exam room and what happens after is beyond the influence, much less control, of testers.

Communication Breakdown in Conversation: Pronunciation, Phonological Reception, Vocabulary... or a little bit of everything?

Alternate title: Dan overthinks a misunderstanding

As part of my ongoing efforts to at least retain, if not develop, my Korean abilities, I have been attending the Korean Conversation Table at my university (also, my wife helps put these on, so I kind of have to go- which is a good thing!).

I usually get grouped with a native speaker or two and some undergraduates who have finished all the Korean coursework and spent some time abroad, so we get some good conversation going on a range of topics. Generally, communication is doable, if a bit laborious at times, but occasionally someone experiences a breakdown, small or large.

At the most recent meeting, I experienced a major breakdown, but it was due to a really small bit that, once I realized my error, made me want to smack myself on the forehead. Another learner was talking about an internship she applied for, and she was worried that the working hours would be long- a topic I could generally follow along. In trying to explain her concerns about long working hours, she was talking about keeping a 9-5 schedule. In Korean, she was using the word 퇴근 (/twɛ.gɯn/), meaning "leaving work time", repeatedly (which makes sense). But for some reason, I kept hearing what I thought was something like 제근 (/dʑɛ.gɯn/)- a word that doesn't exist. It's worth mentioning that I think her pronunciation is quite clear (moreso than my own!), so I don't really know what was going on with my perception. I keyed on to the 근 morpheme, which I recognized as "work" and it was something that made sense given the context, so I started to think that "제근" was something like "regular work" (제 can mean something like "system" or "correct").

After sitting and listening, and spinning the gears in my head over what this word I thought I was hearing could mean, eventually I had to ask some clarification questions.  This helped me understand that she was actually saying 퇴근, a word I knew which makes total sense in this context (hence the smacking myself on the forehead). To indicate that I knew what she meant in relation to the topic, I offered the word 야근, which means "overtime"- a word that maybe I was expecting, given the topic, but she was unfamiliar with.

Meanwhile, the native speaker in the group naturally had no trouble following and helping both of us.

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.

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.

An Odd Lexical Form Error: Mis-Ordered Compounds

"Where is the paper-toilet?"

Have you ever heard a language learner flip the order of a compound word? Have you ever done it yourself? I have caught myself doing this on multiple occasions. Here's a recent example from a text chat:

Me saying "outage power" instead of "power outage" in Korean.

If you don't read Korean, basically what's happening here is I tried to ask if a power outage was still going on. Instead of "power outage", though, I wrote "outage power" (actually, the examples work the other way around in Korean, which will be important later). My wife (KyuJin Lee in the chat window) corrected me. Somehow, I had retrieved this word in the wrong order but with the correct constituent meanings. The two stems/roots in the Korean word for 'power outage' (or 'black out') are phonemically and orthographically similar, differing only by the type of nasal consonant in the coda (ㄴ v. ㅇ). But this has happened to me in the past with less similar stems. What could be going on here? And furthermore, why couldn't I recall any of my former ESL students doing this? (not to say that they never did, but I just couldn't recall it- and couldn't recall reading about these kinds of errors, where the lexical form and root meaning of individual stems was kept in tact).

For one thing, I probably had weak form representation in my mental lexicon for this particular word. I had only learned it the day before! You can see in this next screenshot where I engage in some negotiation of meaning and Kyujin provides an explanation ('the lights don't turn on') and a L1 translation for me: 

My first encounter with 정전 'power outage'.

I don't think it was purely related to weak phonological/orthographic form issues, though... I am very familiar with 전 as a stem that refers to electricity. And again, I've caught myself in the past flipping stems in compounds that are more phonemically/orthographically distinct. I asked r/linguistics for any ideas, and was suggested to look into morphological headedness and possible crosslinguistic transfer by u/Darkgamma- something that hadn't even crossed my mind.

Briefly, the concept of a 'head' in linguistics is how language is organized around some key, prime component. Syntactically, English is head-initial: the head typically comes at the beginning of the phrase or clause ('in the park', 'the man I met yesterday'). Korean, syntactically, is head-final ('park-in', 'yesterday met man'). However, morphologically, both languages are considered to be head-right. For most compounds, this means the primary element will come last. Take 'toothbrush' for example- it's a brush for teeth; it's essential category of being is 'brush'; 'tooth' just specifies what it's used for. Similarly, Korean for 'toothbrush' is 칫솔 ('tooth'+'brush'). So in my case, morphological headedness transfer shouldn't lead to errors. However, it can for people whose first language is left-headed, such as Spanish or French. Nicoladis (2002) reported that young French-English bilingual children were more likely to flip English compounds than monolingual peers.

Anyway, with headedness transfer not sufficiently explaining the matter in my case, I turned to alternate explanations, and found some promise in Ko, Wang, and Kim (2011) (there are a number of studies looking at Korean-English and Chinese-English compounds, I am finding). Looking and Korean-English bilinguals, they found beneficial processing effects for direct translations ('toothbrush' would fit this category) compared to translations that didn't line up (English 'bankbook' does not translate directly to Korean, which uses a compound formed from different stems to express the same concept). They also found an effect for word frequency of constituents in the compound, and concluded that there is cross-language lexical activation and morphological decomposition involved in L2 compound word recognition. This at least satisfies my error with 'power outage'/정전: despite both languages being morphologically head-right, Korean places the stem for 'power' on the right while English has it on the left, resulting in a misalignment for me cross linguistically- I tried to put 'power' on the left in Korean! Additionally, the stem 정 doesn't exactly line up semantically with 'out' or 'outage'... it's closer to 'stay' (as in stop moving, remain in place for awhile) in this sense. It would be very interesting to collect more instances of this sort of error in production and see how this all pans out.

If you have any stories about flipping compounds, I'd definitely be interested in hearing them!


References:

Ko, I. Y., Wang, M., & Kim, S. Y. (2011). Bilingual reading of compound words. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 40, 49-73.

Nicoladis, N. (2002). What's the difference between 'toilet paper' and 'paper toilet'? French-English bilingual children's crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Journal of Child Language, 29, 843-863.