Tuesday 12 May 2020

Woo Watch: speed reading

A friend recently forwarded to me an email from a BBC reporter (radio Leicester) making inquiries about speed reading. The email said:
The aim would be for someone to speed read the 50 page Government document that becomes available at approx. 3:30pm today and take us through the key points they managed to pick up along with giving us the time it took to do it.The aim would be for someone to speed read the 50 page Government document that becomes available at approx. 3:30pm today and take us through the key points they managed to pick up along with giving us the time it took to do it.
I wasn't sure if this was a joke so I looked up the reporter on twitter and found the following:

BBC radio Leicester 
So they found someone! They found one "Anne Jones" who has a reading speed of around 4,000 WPM! Jones read a 50 page government document in 8.5 seconds according to Carpenter. I questioned this in a tweet saying, "this isn't possible, is it?" Oddly his tweet disappeared shortly after that. 

Many people, including me, would like to be able to read faster and there are lots of people, like Anne Jones, running course or selling books to tell you how this can be done. 

One such person is Susan Norman who you may remember as the author of several books and articles on NLPNorman wrote The Speed Reading Bible with Jan Cisek an environmental psychologist and  Feng Shui expert (you can see him talking about Feng Shui for animals on the BBC here). 

I have only been able to get a sample of their book but it contains tips and hints about how to improve your reading speed. Some of these seem eminently sensible like "have a clear aim for your reading" and "Don’t think ‘reading’, think ‘finding information’". The kind of advice we give to international students taking university courses. Others seem less convincing, such as the following:  
Speed up your brain with ‘super-duperreading’* Look quickly (1-4 seconds) down the middle of the page using your finger to guide you for about 10 pages or until you begin to make sense of some of the words. Then start reading with comprehension – but you’ll be reading more quickly because your brain is reacting more quickly.
Likewise the suggestion to trainees to "open your peripheral vision" is a curious one. 

So is speed reading possible? The short answer is "no". Although it would be nice to read hundreds of books every week, sadly we are stuck with the roughly 300 words a minute that "average" native speakers read at. 


The longer answer is, it depends what you mean by "reading". Speed reading is really just skimming, and skimming involves a necessary decline in comprehension. You can go through a text faster but you won't be getting as much info, -you'll just be missing bits out. 

it is unlikely that 400 words per minute can be easily surpassed as when reading, people subvocalise and therefore there is a physical limit to the speed they can read at. There is also a physical limit on how fast your eye can move across a page focusing on the words and 8 seconds for 50 pages is, I would guess, beyond that limit. 

Speed reading may sound "far out" but it actually looks quite tame when compared to a relatively new phenomenon, known as "quantum speed reading". As with all things quantum and neuro, you are probably wise to be skeptical. The breathless blurb on the QSR website tells us that it is:
a completely new technique for reading books without looking at the pages. It was developed in Japan and has been taught to both children and adults there for the last several years. Astonishing as it may seem to most of us who learned only to read books by reading a page at a time they can in fact be read by simply flipping the pages
They don't really just mean flipping pages though, right? Check the video. 




According to method creator Yumiko Tobitani, "after 72 classes, students can finish reading a 100,000-word book within five minutes" Although QSR doesn't seem to have taken off in Japan, it has found some success in China.

Whether it's learning a language in 10 days or in your sleep, humans will continue to look for short cuts to doing difficult things and there will always be those willing to offer a helping hand. In the case of Tobitani, this will only set you back $350

Friday 10 April 2020

Woo Watch: The rise of Neuro


There are those in ELT who aren't fans of  science and research. 'It's an art' they protest, 'stop trying to measure everything!' On the other side are those who grab science and embrace it wholeheartedly. Sometimes these hugs can be a little too hard, leaving science with broken bones and internal bleeding. The intention is good but the result is a squishy, science shaped mess. 

One example of this is the rise of "Neuro" in teaching. The Neuro crowd are not doubt well-intentioned but can sometimes seem to stray dangerously close to the "woo" side of the forceSatel and Lilienfeld note that neuroscience "is vulnerable to being oversold by the media, some overzealous scientists, and neuroentrepreneurs who tout facile conclusions that reach far beyond what the current evidence warrants". 

Neuroscience is a legitimate science which offers many promising insights but as Dorothy Bishop, Professor of developmental neuropsychology notes, the attempts to link it to education are often misjudged. And she is not the only one. Daniel Willingham has written that Neuroscience applied to education is "mostly unimpressive", stating that there is "definitely a lot of neuro-garbage in the education market." As the authors of "Brainwashed" note, there are many educational enterprises that seem to "merely dress up or repackage good advice with neuroscientific findings that add nothing to the overall program."

"Neuro" is popping up increasingly in ELT. For instance, in a recently published piece by Cambridge University Press on "neurolearning" the author argues that "neurolearning" is useful for creating a "brain-compatible environment". The article goes on to use language like "Homeostasis" and "Hypothalamus" in order to suggest rather ordinary things like keeping the classroom at a good temperature. The author published another article saying that "no matter the target language, try to think about activities that will appeal to the different learning styles – visual, auditory and kinaesthetic." and "a brain-compatible environment can only be created by a passionate teacher". Unfortunately, after some online criticism, the page seems to have been removed. Exactly what the word "neuro" adds to any of the approaches suggested in article, is not clear. 


Another example of the rise of "neuro" is "neurolanguage coaching®", which is a mix of coaching and neuroscience. It's creator claims that:
Neurolanguage Coaches are trained in the practical application of neuroscientific principles, relating to how the brain learns, functions and reacts, in particular in relation to emotional triggers when learning a language, drawing Krashen´s affective filter into the scientific evidence arena.
Similarly, in Japan, 'neuro' has taken off! The Japanese Language Teaching association (JALT) has a special interest group know as the "mind brain and Education" sig. The sig promotes something called NeuroELT. The group began as a charity project after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and went on to hold a series of conferences called the FAB11


I don't know much about these approaches and don't particularly have any bones to pick with either, but in both cases, as with neurolearning, it's a little unclear as to what precisely the role of "neuro" plays, other than to provide a slightly scientific veneer to otherwise ordinary educational practices. Is there that much to be gained by knowing that the prefrontal context "lights up" when students play Hangman? 

Bloblolgy 

Another curious side-effect of the rise of Neuro are the endless pictures of colourful brains accompanied by effusive explanations that this proves that X or Y is the case:
Here’s a spot that lights up when subjects think of God (“Religion center found!”), or researchers find a region for love (“Love found in the brain”). Neuroscientists sometimes refer disparagingly to these studies as “blobology,” their tongue-in-cheek label for studies that show which brain areas become activated as subjects experience X or perform task Y. (link)
These images can be surprisingly effective. It has been shown that brain images of the type neuroscience produces, actually helps to make research seem more believable. However, when even a dead salmon in an FMRI scanner can produce exciting looking blobs, we should proceed with caution. 

This current "neurophilia" is not completely without precedent in ELT. The 90s saw a rise in popularity of Neuro-linguistic programming. NLP, which has very strong pseudoscientific elements became so popular that it made appearances in a number of respectable people's work. And what concerns me is that people who might have previously been previously swept up in various "brain-based" approaches might now be getting swept up in the "neuro" craze. 

For example, I recently discovered that the "language teacher"Journal had had an NLP special edition (volume 21, no. 2) and one of the contributors to this special edition, an advocate of educational hypnosis and a proponent of NLP, is also a founder of the JALT Brain, Mind and Education sig. Other founders have also published articles on, for example, the Kolb model of learning styles, the learning pyramid (a theory which must surely be on life support at this point) and a study into the VAK learning styles of over 30,000 dental students. 

These articles are fairly old and it is possible that the authors no longer buy into these kinds of practices. Evidence for this can be seen in that the group has a handy neuro myths website and the NeuroELT website explicitly warns readers to watch out for neuromythsThe creator of "neurolanguage coaching®" has, likewise, explicitly distanced herself from NLP (her upcoming conference, however, does feature one speaker who is an NLP practitioner.)  All of this is reassuring, but  I am still left with a linger sense of unease about the prospects for "neuro" in ELT. 

One area where 'Neuro' has already 'contributed' to education is in the proliferation and acceptance of many neuromyths. Lethaby and Harries have shown that, as in other areas of education, many ELT teachers believe that people only use 10% of their brains or that there are left brained and right brained learners. But the prevalence of neuromyths and experts warning about giving too much attention to the "neuro" prefix seem to falling on deaf ears. No doubt neuroscience can bring interesting and useful findings to education, but the rush to embrace this new toy could also end badly. 


Sunday 19 January 2020

Is the end of Erasmus Nigh?

While working in Leicester University I had a few classes teaching Erasmus students.These were always an interesting change from a lot of the other EAP classes we used to teach and although the students could be a bit challenging at times, they were a memorable bunch of students. I was a shocked earlier this year to see "Erasmus" trending on twitter and a large number of accounts mourning the (imminent) loss of the program. But are Eramsus' days really numbered? Here is Dan Jones from the University of Leicester to try to explain what's going on.



For the last two years I’ve had a Google Alert set up for the combined key words of Brexit and Erasmus. Every so often, but not too often, I get a ping telling me about a Brexit/Erasmus news story. I’ve learnt that either the Google Alert algorithm or the UK government isn’t working. I get surprisingly few pings. 


If you’re not familiar with Erasmus, here’s the quickest of summaries. Firstly, as an acronym it’s a bit of a stretch. It’s the EuRopean Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Students can select up to 4 modules a semester, basically the same ones as the undergraduate students but they can choose from across departments. Some come for just a semester and some for the whole academic year (yes all seven months of it). We currently have students from Spain, France, Germany and Italy. The outbound British students get all the attention in the UK press (as we’ll see a lot of them grow up to be journalists), but the other half of the story is the students from other EU countries who come to study in the UK. 

It’s centrally funded through the EU and runs in 7-year blocks. The current one ends this year and therefore the UK can’t keep putting off signing up for 2021-2027 much longer. Each 7 years has seen the budget and remit expand. The current programme’s budget is 14.7 billion euros. The new programme is notable for its budget of 30 billion euros.

The UK’s involvement may now come to an end. What follows is a short Brexit story where nothing very much happens.

From 24th June 2016 until December 2018 nothing very much happened. In universities, the plan was ‘wait and see’. The government offered to underwrite the current programme, which was nice, but nobody believed them, so universities had to give their own separate guarantees (e.g and e.g.).

The government advice on Erasmus up until 8th December 2018 started with “A scenario in which the UK leaves the EU without agreement (a ‘no deal’ scenario) remains unlikely given the mutual interests of the UK and the EU in securing a negotiated outcome.” By December, it became clear that the May strategy of running down the clock and calling everyone’s bluff was a long shot and wasn’t going to work. Without making a fuss, on the 23rd December 2018, a civil servant updated the advice to “Delivering the deal negotiated with the EU remains the government’s top priority. This has not changed. However, the government must prepare for every eventuality, including a no deal scenario.”

Just to repeat: NOTHING HAS CHANGED 



At a government level it wasn’t clear what preparing for every eventuality actually meant. But by January 2019 it meant hanging the universities out to dry “UK organisations may wish to consider bilateral arrangements with partner organisations that would enable their projects to continue.”

At a university level, all they could do was publish a reassuring strategy statement (e.g), but as everyone was fond of saying you can’t start doing new deals until you’ve left the old one. At a course planning level, how exactly do you prepare for every eventuality? Do you both plan and not plan all the modules, allocate and not allocate hours to teachers, book and not book rooms? So we decided to wait and see. 

This period of limbo gave journalists the opportunity to reflect on what the UK might lose. This and this being the most recent. Essential elements are 1) Facebook just reminded me I was an Erasmus student. 2) I had a lot of fun, 3) That was the year I found myself, 4) It wasn’t all about the drinking. 




From my experience of hungover and sleep-deprived students, there’s some truth to the partying aspect. I can’t say about the finding yourself. But as all these articles quite rightly go on to say, Erasmus students get to experience living somewhere else, and from an academic point of view, they get to study modules at degree level outside of their specialisation. Our Shakespeare and literature modules are taken by students from all academic backgrounds. We have students doing a TESOL module who had previously not given a thought to teaching, let alone teaching English (though admittedly, that doesn't sound too different to the usual route into teaching English). 


If you were in the UK in 2019 you won’t need reminding that, politically, it went a bit mad. In the run up to the original Brexit deadline of 29th March, El Pais was reporting that Spanish universities were discouraging their students from applying to the UK. At my university, 20% of our Erasmus students are from Spain. But otherwise it was more ‘wait and see’. 

A survey published in April 2019 of prospective students painted a more complex picture. When asked about whether they were more or less likely to study in the UK due to Brexit, 36% of EU students were less interested, 6% more interested. For non-EU international students it’s 10% less interested and 14% more interested. The proportion of ‘more interested’ might seem surprising, but it seems that some students see that a weakened UK pound will give them more spending power and a weakened UK HE will give students more leverage in getting into a higher ranked programme and university. 

Of course it’s the majority in the middle that are neither more nor less interested and fortunately they just carried on as usual, and when we got to the start of term, the numbers held up quite well. We even have Spanish students. The El Pais article was either inaccurate or the students ignored the advice. For most students, the only thing that will stop them applying is taking down the application form. 

In November 2019 Universities UK published “A ‘NO DEAL’ BREXIT: IMPLICATIONS FOR UNIVERSITIES AND MINIMISING RISK” They left the caps lock on as it’s directed at the government and it’s full of specific advice on what should be done. After years of vague technical notices, this is refreshingly readable (for a report on education policy). 

Over the last week, there’s been a bit more pinging from my Google Alert than usual. Firstly, the Liberal Democrats tabled an Erasmus amendment to the withdrawal agreement bill. And when it was inevitably voted down, it was reported in the most pessimistic terms: U.K. Parliament Vote Casts Doubt On Future Of Erasmus Study Abroad Scheme and Fears over future for Erasmus international student exchange scheme after Brexit. (This second of these has this great celeb filler: "Fifty Shades of Grey author EL James was among those taking to social media to denounce the outcome, which she branded disgraceful”. Well if EL James says it’s disgraceful…). But as each of these reports goes on to concede, this doesn’t actually mean anything. With the exception of last year’s madness, opposition amendments don’t get voted for by the government.

In fact, there are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, saying we’ll probably stay in but if we don’t then we’ll make our own, at least suggests an engagement with the issue. It does raise the question, why would you make your own when there’s a perfectly good one that we’re already using? But it’s not unprecedented, Switzerland withdrew from Erasmus in 2015 as part of a move to limit immigration. The result was the Swiss-European Mobility programme.

At this point I’m as miserable as the next person on this rain sodden island, but I seem to be a bit more optimistic about Erasmus. Once we get past 31st January I think there will be a flurry of mini deals and Erasmus will be one of them. And anyway my most recent Google Alert tells me that Boris Johnson has just said flat out, we’re staying in Erasmus. Now, if we can’t trust the Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s Government then who can we trust?

Friday 3 January 2020

Why there is not, and will never be, a ‘fifth skill’


My first teaching job was working at GEOS. The GEOS method was ingenious. First you present the daily grammar target, then students practice it then you do some kind of role play. It wasn't until I started my MA that I realised that this method hadn't in fact been dreamed up by the geniuses at GEOS. It was PPP!

I first became aware of Jason Anderson's writing when I saw his piece on PPP in ELTJ. As I read the article and the posts that accompanied it, I really enjoyed the level of detail Anderson went into.
 He is someone who can really do a deep dive on a subject, see for example his recent piece on the origin on Jigsaws and information gaps

Jason is one of those people who seems to have produced 5 papers while other people are thinking about writing one. He has written several books and has a very long list of papers and talks to his name with subjects from Translanguaging to teaching large classes. 



Jason Anderson @jasonelt
Teacher educator and researcher: www.jasonanderson.org.uk
Visit Jason’s blog here.




Google the term “fifth skill” and you’ll find numerous references, mainly from (English) language teaching communities, including blogs, talks and even articles in academic journals. The range of things offered forward as ‘the fifth skill’ is extensive, including:
  • translation (e.g., Janulevičienė & Kavaliauskienė, 2002)
  • grammaring (e.g., Larsen-Freeman, 2001)
  • culture (e.g., Hong, 2008)
  • cultural competence (e.g., Kramsch, 1993)
  • intercultural awareness and language learning (Pulverness, 1999)
  • viewing (e.g., Donaghy, 2019)
  • retelling (e.g., Burns, 2005)

And recently even Mario Rinvolucri (2019) joined the ‘fifth skill’ club, proposing… inner monologue. Doh! It seems so obvious now he’s said it. Reference to the fifth skill even shows up on a Google Ngram search (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Google Ngram showing frequency of ‘the four skills’ and ‘the fifth skill’. From https://books.google.com/ngrams/ Copyright 2018, Google Books Ngram Viewer.


Yet, in this (hopefully humorous) blog post, I’m going to argue that they’re all wrong to suggest that X is the fifth skill. First and foremost, if any one of these writers is going to argue that their choice IS the fifth skill, they either have to be ignorant of the numerous prior attempts to offer a fifth skill (which suggests incompetence), or they are dismissing the others as wrong, yet without justifying why (which suggests complacency). They can’t all be the fifth skill, can they?

The point I’d like to make is not that they are wrong to suggest that the specific skill that they are talking about is important – I’m sure that they all are, even inner monologue (how many times has ‘inner karaoke’ saved you from boredom?). There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of identifiably discrete skills involved in learning of any kind, and within this, the learning of languages.

The point is a very simple one. The reason why some of us still talk about ‘the four skills’, sometimes called the “foundational language skills” (Hinkel, 2006, p. 110), is not because we’re so stupid that we haven’t realised that there might be other skills involved in language learning, it’s because we are referring to a matrix of two dichotomous categorical variables that enable us to describe how we use language for communication, what Candlin and Widdowson (1987) call “modes of behaviour”. Any instance of language behaviour, or if you prefer, communicative  language ‘use’ (i.e., excluding entirely internal processes such as inner monologue) involves, on a fundamental level, one of two channels, the written or the spoken channel, and on an individual level, one of two directions – reception (we see or hear something) or production (we utter or write something). That makes 2x2 which equals? You got it, four. See Table 1 – hopefully it’s familiar.

Table 1: Where exactly would you put the fifth skill?

Within each of the four quadrants there are numerous discrete and fuzzy skills, both those things often labelled sub-skills, and many others besides, and there are broader skills that link these four skills together, such as translation. Behind this two-dimensional table there are numerous other cognitive skills that necessarily support and manage acts of communicative language use. And in the beautiful, messy, complex world that is social interaction we are able to use two or more of these skills simultaneously (in conversation, for example). There are also, of course, many other, interpersonal and multimodal skills that accompany our languaging acts. But that doesn’t make any of them ‘the’ fifth skill.

Analysed synthetically at the simplest meaningful level there is no act of language use possible that isn’t unambiguously categorizable within the matrix of the four skills. What I am doing now. What your eyes are doing now. What your speech organs might do if you don’t like this blog, and what the person near to you might do with the sound waves entering their ear to cause them to take offence. That’s why we talk about the four skills. So no, you can’t add another one. Sorry.


References
Burns, D. E. (2005). Your story, my story, history. In Tomlinson, C. A. et al. (Eds.) The parallel curriculum in the classroom, Book 2: Units for Application across the content areas, K-12 (pp. 5-56). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Candlin, C. N. & Widdowson, H. (1987). Language teaching: A scheme for teacher education (preface). In Bygate, M. Speaking (pp. ix-x). Oxford: OUP.
Donaghy, K. (2019). Advancing learning: The fifth skill – ‘viewing’. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.onestopenglish.com/community/teacher-talk/advancing-learning/advancing-learning-the-fifth-skill-viewing/557577.article
Hinkel, E. (2006). Current perspectives on teaching the four skills. Tesol Quarterly, 40(1), 109-131.
Hong, S. (2008). The Role of Heritage students in incorporating culture into language Teaching. South Asia Language Pedagogy and Technology, 1, 1-10.
Janulevičienė, V., & Kavaliauskienė, G. (2002). Promoting the fifth skill in teaching ESP. English for Specific Purposes World, 1(2), 1-6.
Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: OUP.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2001). Teaching Language: From Grammar to Grammaring. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Pulverness, A. (1999). The fifth skill-intercultural awareness and language learning. British Studies Now: Anthology Issues, 2, 6-10.
Rinvolucri, M. (2019). On my mind. IATEFL Voices, 272, 19.