Technology and language acquisition

Technology and language acquisition

I set out to write this after attending a webinar on games in language learning. The talk simply brought to the fore the issue of language learning assisted by technology.

I have been mulling over the implications of using “smart” devices in learning languages for some time now. The issue is, I feel, intricately linked with the question of whether technology affects, modifies, the way the brain works in acquiring language. I haven’t seen any research published on the topic, though there may well be some and it is simply drowned in the sea of online publications.

I am no expert at neurolinguistics – my knowledge amounts to what I was taught ages ago at university and my non-expert pursuit of the discipline throughout my teaching career. However, as an experienced teacher, I do know that there are as many approaches to language learning as learners. For the sake of illustration, I will mention an extreme (?)example of mother tongue interference. In my mother tongue the letter “a” is often a prefix which means “without”. I was once astounded to hear a student of mine interpreting an initial “a” in an English word as a negative prefix. And of course, there have been countless other individual instances of transferring mother tongue or second foreign language rules and generalisations to English(first foreign language most of the times). Add all these complications to the unique way our brains are wired, and you have enough challenges to last you many lifetimes!

At the core of my ramifications lies the overarching question: does or can technology bring about structural changes in the brain which could have a profound influence on how learners approach a foreign language?

Here is where games come into it. While attending the webinar about online games, it occurred to me for the umpteenth time that most of what is used online is a replication of good old conventional material in a digital form. At the risk of being called old-fashioned and technophobic, I would argue that when it comes to games, I mostly prefer the non-digital version. No digital alternative can rival the satisfaction drawn from using a real board with counters, dice and all in class. I am indeed urging a return to “traditional” games where we teachers can share with our students the joy or disappointment, as the case might be, of handling the dice and moving our counters forward or back.

But I am rambling on, and it is time I got back to the main issue: how does technology affect foreign language learning if, on the face of it, it doesn’t bring about structural changes in the brain?

Here, I am cautioning the reader that this is the conclusion of my teaching experience and careful observation of hundreds of learners rather than a theory I could back up with science.

The answer might be that many learners who were and possibly still are not favoured by the exclusive use of grammar rules and translation in order to learn a foreign language now have unlimited access to real language – spoken and written – thanks to the web. They can therefore follow the reverse process of gathering what is acceptable or not in the language through their exposure to it rather than sweating to apply rules to every single utterance they produce. Needless to say, the role of the teacher lies in guiding the students through by selecting and grading this enormous input at our and their fingertips so that they can get onto and stay on the fast track to language acquisition.

Flipped brainstorming

Brainstorming is great as far as it goes. However, I do feel there is a need for flipping it from time to time.

If by brainstorming we mean a quick succession of student responses on a certain topic, I will keep the tempo and the group participation in what I call flipped brainstorming though my goals will vary each time, and this will become clear further down, when I attempt to demonstrate my proposition.

How and why?

The answer to “how” is not so simple. Suffice to say, the students will extract the ideas from a given text.

As for “why,” briefly, there is a lot to be gained and no waste of time. 

1.  The students are sometimes hard put to reel off the ideas and dress them in words to boot.

2.  There is plenty of opportunity to tease the students’ brains by firing questions at them.

3.  The teacher can test the students’ assimilation of already taught vocabulary and/or activate the students’ minds by inviting them to extrapolate meaning from context.

However, to be able to totally engage the students in the process, the teacher must use the right content – it is a prerequisite.

Therefore, I will now illustrate, reinforcing the points I made above.

Level: advanced

I used it with my post-FCE students on the road to Proficiency.

Content

Many of us, yielding to the pressure of imminent exams, compromise on enjoyment. We often find ourselves selecting material which will serve a dual purpose: teach new language and familiarise our students with issues and questions which are beyond their age and scope of interests but crop up in language qualification exams.

My instinct is to resist exam requirements though, to be honest, I usually engineer some kind of middle-of-the-road attitude to save the day.

Literature and poetry are great resources for killing two birds with one stone, and James Thurber is a writer whose works constitute ideal material for introducing serious issues in an amusing and challenging way.

I chose his story The Night the Bed Fell to illustrate my “flipped brainstorming”.

I divided the story in three parts for manageability and a touch of suspense.

I am well aware of my students’ knowledge and ability, so my use of this text and choice of activities suits my situation, but one could easily adapt them to their own reality – whether that is upgrading or downgrading the difficulty or the focus on the new vocabulary. I provide images when this will save me valuable time and will be a more appropriate way of explaining the meaning of lexical items.

First, I gave my students a copy of the first part of the story and asked them to read it. I deliberately kept the text free of activities so that they would concentrate on content.

Here is a copy of the first part of the story (arbitrarily divided) with the vocabulary exercise and the explanatory footnotes.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/11WcvO2YivyzKsihg9abLTixR_JSvLUqL/view?usp=sharing

When they were ready, (I could already detect some faint smiles) I started asking questions which were meant to elicit all the detail I wanted and place emphasis on guessing meaning wherever possible.

Here is a copy of the questions:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEUgwUxCT-_s5Usn8AGtXIL9fg9V-TkL/view?usp=sharing

My first question was a way of making my students guess the word “verisimilitude,” which they did as the context allowed them to do so.

Question 6 was meant to check whether they remembered the word “wobbly”, which I had recently revised and reinforced. I was pleased when I got the answer by one of them. Question 9 was designed to remind them of the meaning of “interval” as “break” and introduce its meaning in the phrase “at intervals”. And so on and so forth.

I am simply trying to explain how different teachers can take advantage of a resource depending on their aims and their students’ knowledge and needs.

Of course, I almost never forgo the opportunity to boost the students’ learning of vocabulary with a vocabulary exercise!

Parts 2 and 3 are structured in the same way. The story went down really well, and my reward was to see some students hardly able to contain themselves!