Edtech and sustainability

Last September, Cambridge published a ‘Sustainability Framework for ELT’, which attempts to bring together environmental, social and economic sustainability. It’s a kind of 21^st century skills framework and is designed to help teachers ‘to integrate sustainability skills development’ into their lessons. Among the sub-skills that are listed, a handful grabbed my attention:

• Identifying and understanding obstacles to sustainability
• Broadening discussion and including underrepresented voices
• Understanding observable and hidden consequences
• Critically evaluating sustainability claims
• Understanding the bigger picture

Hoping to brush up my skills in these areas, I decided to take a look at the upcoming BETT show in London, which describes itself as ‘the biggest Education Technology exhibition in the world’. BETT and its parent company, Hyve, ‘are committed to redefining sustainability within the event industry and within education’. They are doing this by reducing their ‘onsite printing and collateral’. (‘Event collateral’ is an interesting event-industry term that refers to all the crap that is put into delegate bags, intended to ‘enhance their experience of the event’.) BETT and Hyve are encouraging all sponsors to go paperless, too, ‘switching from seat-drop collateral to QR codes’, and delegate bags will no longer be offered. They are partnering with various charities to donate ‘surplus food and furniture’ to local community projects, they are donating to other food charities that support families in need, and they are recycling all of the aisle banners into tote bags. Keynote speakers will include people like Sally Uren, CEO of ‘Forum for the Future’, who will talk about ‘Transforming carbon neutral education for a just and regenerative future’.

BETT and Hyve want us to take their corporate and social responsibility very seriously. All of these initiatives are very commendable, even though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they will redefine sustainability within the event industry and education. But there is a problem – and it’s not that the world is already over-saturated with recycled tote bags. As the biggest jamboree of this kind in the world, the show attracts over 600 vendors and over 30,000 visitors, with over 120 countries represented. Quite apart from all the collateral and surplus furniture, the carbon and material footprint of the event cannot be negligible. Think of all those start-up solution-providers flying and driving into town, AirB’n’B-ing for the duration, and Ubering around town after hours, for a start.

But this is not really the problem, either. Much as the event likes to talk about ‘driving impact and improving outcomes for teachers and learners’, the clear and only purpose of the event is to sell stuff. It is to enable the investors in the 600+ edtech solution-providers in the exhibition area to move towards making a return on their investment. If we wanted to talk seriously about sustainability, the question that needs to be asked is: to what extent does all the hardware and software on sale contribute in any positive and sustainable way to education? Is there any meaningful social benefit to be derived from all this hardware and software, or is it all primarily just a part of a speculative, financial game? Is the corporate social responsibility of BETT / Hyve a form of green-washing to disguise the stimulation of more production and consumption? Is it all just a kind of environmentalism of the rich’ (Dauvergne, 2016).

Edtech is not the most pressing of environmental problems – indeed, there are examples of edtech that are likely more sustainable than the non-tech alternatives – but the sustainability question remains. There are at least four environmental costs to edtech:

• The energy-greedy data infrastructures that lie behind digital transactions
• The raw ingredients of digital devices
• The environmentally destructive manufacture and production of digital devices
• The environmental cost of dismantling and disposing digital hardware (Selwyn, 2018)

Some forms of edtech are more environmentally costly than others. First, we might consider the material costs. Going back to pre-internet days, think of the countless tonnes of audio cassettes, VCR tapes, DVDs and CD-ROMs. Think of the discarded playback devices, language laboratories and IWBs. None of these are easily recyclable and most have ended up in landfill, mostly in countries that never used these products. These days the hardware that is used for edtech is more often a device that serves other non-educational purposes, but the planned obsolescence of our phones, tablets and laptops is a huge problem for sustainability.

More important now are probably the energy costs of edtech. Audio and video streaming might seem more environmentally friendly than CDs and DVDs, but, depending on how often the CD or DVD is used, the energy cost of streaming (especially high quality video) can be much higher than using the physical format. AI ups the ante significantly (Brevini, 2022). Five years ago, a standard ‘AI training model in linguistics emit more than 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent’ (Strubell et al., 2019). With exponentially greater volumes of data now being used, the environmental cost is much, much higher. Whilst VR vendors will tout the environmental benefits of cutting down on travel, getting learners together in a physical room may well have a much lower carbon footprint than meeting in the Metaverse.

When doing the calculus of edtech, we need to evaluate the use-value of the technology. Does the tech actually have any clear educational (or other social) benefit, or is its value primarily in terms of its exchange-value?

To illustrate the difference between use-value and exchange-value, I’d like to return again to the beginnings of modern edtech in ELT. As the global market for ELT materials mushroomed in the 1990s, coursebook publishers realised that, for a relatively small investment, they could boost their sales by bringing out ‘new editions’ of best-selling titles. This meant a new cover, replacing a few texts and topics, making minor modifications to other content, and, crucially, adding extra features. As the years went by, these extra features became digital: CD-ROMs, DVDs, online workbooks and downloadables of various kinds. The publishers knew that sales depended on the existence of these shiny new things, even if many buyers made minimal use or zero use of them. But they gave the marketing departments and sales reps a pitch, and justified an increase in unit price. Did these enhanced coursebooks actually represent any increase in use-value? Did learners make better or faster progress in English as a result? On the whole, the answer has to be an unsurprising and resounding no. We should not be surprised if hundreds of megabytes of drag-and-drop grammar practice fail to have much positive impact on learning outcomes. From the start, it was the impact on the exchange-value (sales and profits) of these products that was the driving force.

Edtech vendors have always wanted to position themselves to potential buyers as ‘solution providers’, trumpeting the use-value of what they are selling. When it comes to attracting investors, it’s a different story, one that is all about minimum viable products, scalability and return on investment.

There are plenty of technologies that have undisputed educational use-value in language learning and teaching. Google Docs, Word, Zoom and YouTube come immediately to mind. Not coincidentally, they are not technologies that were designed for educational purposes. But when you look at specifically educational technology, It becomes much harder (though not impossible) to identify unambiguous gains in use-value. Most commonly, the technology holds out the promise of improved learning, but evidence that it has actually achieved this is extremely rare. Sure, a bells-and-whistles LMS offers exciting possibilities for flipped or blended learning, but research that demonstrates the effectiveness of these approaches in the real world is sadly lacking. Sure, VR might seem to offer a glimpse of motivated learners interacting meaningfully in the Metaverse, but I wouldn’t advise you to bet on it.

And betting is what most edtech is all about. An eye-watering $16.1 billion of venture capital was invested in global edtech in 2020. What matters is not that any of these products or services have any use-value, but that they are perceived to have a use-value. Central to this investment is the further commercialisation and privatisation of education (William & Hogan 2020). BETT is a part of this.

Returning to the development of my sustainability skills, I still need to consider the bigger picture. I’ve suggested that it is difficult to separate edtech from a consideration of capitalism, a system that needs to manufacture consumption, to expand production and markets in order to survive (Dauvergne, 2016: 48). Economic growth is the sine qua non of this system, and it is this that makes the British government (and others) so keen on BETT. Education and edtech in particular are rapidly growing markets. But growth is only sustainable, in environmental terms, if it is premised on things that we actually need, rather than things which are less necessary and ecologically destructive (Hickel, 2020). At the very least, as Selwyn (2021) noted, we need more diverse thinking: ‘What if environmental instability cannot be ‘solved’ simply through the expanded application of digital technologies but is actually exacerbated through increased technology use?’

References

Brevini, B. (2022) Is AI Good for the Planet? Cambridge: Polity Press

Dauvergne, P. (2016) Environmentalism of the Rich. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Hickel, J. (2020) Less Is More. London: William Heinemann

Selwyn, N. (2018) EdTech is killing us all: facing up to the environmental consequences of digital education. EduResearch Matters 22 October, 2018. https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=3293

Selwyn, N. (2021) Ed-Tech Within Limits: Anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis. E-Learning and Digital Media, 18 (5): 496 – 510. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20427530211022951

Strubell, E., Ganesh, A. & McCallum, A. (2019) Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP. Cornell University: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02243.pdf

Williamson, B. & Hogan, A. (2020) Commercialisation and privatisation in / of education in the context of Covid-19. Education International

Questions about pre-teaching vocabulary (PTV)

‘Pre-teaching’ (of vocabulary) is a widely-used piece of language teaching jargon, but it’s a strange expression. The ‘pre’ indicates that it’s something that comes before something else that is more important, what Chia Suan Chong calls ‘the main event’, which is usually some reading or listening work. The basic idea, it seems, is to lessen the vocabulary load of the subsequent activity. If the focus on vocabulary were the ‘main event’, we might refer to the next activity as ‘post-reading’ or ‘post-listening’ … but we never do.

The term is used in standard training manuals by both Jim Scrivener (2005: 230 – 233) and Jeremy Harmer (2012: 137) and, with a few caveats, the practice is recommended. Now read this from the ELT Nile Glossary:

For many years teachers were recommended to pre-teach vocabulary before working on texts. Nowadays though, some question this, suggesting that the contexts that teachers are able to set up for pre-teaching are rarely meaningful and that pre-teaching in fact prevents learners from developing the attack strategies they need for dealing with challenging texts.

Chia is one of those doing this questioning. She suggests that ‘we cut out pre-teaching altogether and go straight for the main event. After all, if it’s a receptive skills lesson, then shouldn’t the focus be on reading/listening skills and strategies? And most importantly, pre-teaching prevents learners’ from developing a tolerance of ambiguity – a skill that is vital in language learning.’ Scott Thornbury is another who has expressed doubts about the value of PTV, although he is more circumspect in his opinions. He has argued that working out the meaning of vocabulary from context is probably a better approach and that PTV inadequately prepares learners for the real world. If we have to pre-teach, he argues, get it out of the way ‘as quickly and efficiently as possible’ … or ‘try post-teaching instead’.

Both Chia and Scott touch on the alternatives, and guessing the meaning of unknown words from context is one of them. I’ve discussed this area in an earlier post. Not wanting to rehash the content of that post here, the simple summary is this: it’s complicated. We cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that guessing meaning from context leads to more gains in either reading / listening comprehension or vocabulary development than PTV or one of the other alternatives – encouraging / allowing monolingual or bilingual dictionary look up (see this post on the topic), providing a glossary (see this post) or doing post-text vocabulary work.

In attempting to move towards a better understanding, the first problem is that there is very little research into the relationship between PTV and improved reading / listening comprehension. What there is (e.g. Webb, 2009) suggests that pre-teaching can improve comprehension and speed up reading, but there are other things that a teacher can do (e.g. previous presentation of comprehension questions or the provision of pictorial support) that appear to lead to more gains in these areas (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021). It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. There is even less research looking at the relationship between PTV and vocabulary development. What there is (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021) suggests that pre-teaching leads to more vocabulary gains than when learners read without any support. But the reading-only condition is unlikely in most real-world learning contexts, where there is a teacher, dictionary or classmate who can be turned to. A more interesting contrast is perhaps between PTV and during-reading vocabulary instruction, which is a common approach in many classrooms. One study (File & Adams, 2010) looked at precisely this area and found little difference between the approaches in terms of vocabulary gains. The limited research does not provide us with any compelling reasons either for or against PTV.

Another problem is, as usual, that the research findings often imply more than was actually demonstrated. The abstract for the study by Pellicer-Sánchez et al (2021) states that pre‐reading instruction led to more vocabulary learning. But this needs to be considered in the light of the experimental details.

The study involved 87 L2 undergraduates and postgraduates studying at a British university. Their level of English was therefore very high, and we can’t really generalise to other learners at other levels in other conditions. The text that they read contained a number of pseudo-words and was 2,290 words long. The text itself, a narrative, was of no intrinsic interest, so the students reading it would treat it as an object of study and they would notice the pseudo-words, because their level of English was already high, and because they knew that the focus of the research was on ‘new words’. In other words, the students’ behaviour was probably not at all typical of a student in a ‘normal’ classroom. In addition, the pseudo-words were all Anglo-Saxon looking, and not therefore representative of the kinds of unknown items that students would encounter in authentic (or even pedagogical) texts (which would have a high proportion of words with Latin roots). I’m afraid I don’t think that the study tells us anything of value.

Perhaps research into an area like this, with so many variables that need to be controlled, is unlikely ever to provide teachers with clear answers to what appears to be a simple question: is PTV a good idea or not? However, I think we can get closer to something resembling useful advice if we take another tack. For this, I think two additional questions need to be asked. First, what is the intended main learning opportunity (note that I avoid the term ‘learning outcome’!) of the ‘main event’ – the reading or listening. Second, following on from the first question, what is the point of PTV, i.e. in what ways might it contribute to enriching the learning opportunities of the ‘main event’?

To answer the first question, I think it is useful to go back to a distinction made almost forty years ago in a paper by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). They contrasted the Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) with the Text as a Vehicle for Information (TAVI). The former (TALO) is something that language students study to learn language from in a direct way. It has typically been written or chosen to illustrate and to contextualise bits of grammar, and to provide opportunities for lexical ‘quarrying’. The latter (TAVI) is a text with intrinsic interest, read for information or pleasure, and therefore more appropriately selected by the learner, rather than the teacher. For an interesting discussion on TALO and TAVI, see this 2015 post from Geoff Jordan.

Johns and Davies wrote their article in pre-Headway days when texts in almost all coursebooks were unashamedly TALOs, and when what were called top-down reading skills (reading for gist / detail, etc.) were only just beginning to find their way into language teaching materials. TAVIs were separate, graded readers, for example. In some parts of the world, TALOs and TAVIs are still separate, often with one teacher dealing with the teaching of discrete items of language through TALOs, and another responsible for ‘skills development’ through TAVIs. But, increasingly, under the influence of British publishers and methodologists, attempts have been made to combine TALOs and TAVIs in a single package. The syllabus of most contemporary coursebooks, fundamentally driven by a discrete-item grammar plus vocabulary approach, also offer a ‘skills’ strand which requires texts to be intrinsically interesting, meaningful and relevant to today’s 21^st century learners. The texts are required to carry out two functions.

Recent years have seen an increasingly widespread questioning of this approach. Does the exploitation of reading and listening texts in coursebooks (mostly through comprehension questions) actually lead to gains in reading and listening skills? Is there anything more than testing of comprehension going on? Or do they simply provide practice in strategic approaches to reading / listening, strategies which could probably be transferred from L1? As a result of the work of scholars like William Grabe (reading) and John Field and Richard Cauldwell (listening), there is now little, if any, debate in the world of research about these questions. If we want to develop the reading / listening skills of our students, the approach of most coursebooks is not the way to go about it. For a start, the reading texts are usually too short and the listening texts too long.

Most texts that are found in most contemporary coursebooks are TALOs dressed up to look like TAVIs. Their fundamental purpose is to illustrate and contextualise language that has either been pre-taught or will be explored later. They are first and foremost vehicles for language, and only secondarily vehicles for information. They are written and presented in as interesting a way as possible in order to motivate learners to engage with the TALO. Sometimes, they succeed.

However, there are occasions (even in coursebooks) when texts are TAVIs – used for purely ‘skills’ purposes, language use as opposed to language study. Typically, they (reading or listening texts) are used as springboards for speaking and / or writing practice that follows. It’s the information in the text that matters most.

So, where does all this take us with PTV? Here is my attempt at a break-down of advice.

1 TALOs where the text contains a set of new lexical items which are a core focus of the lesson

If the text is basically a contextualized illustration of a set of lexical items (and, usually, a particular grammatical structure), there is a strong case for PTV. This is, of course, assuming that these items are of sufficiently high frequency to be suitable candidates for direct vocabulary instruction. If this is so, there is also a strong case to be made for the PTV to be what has been called ‘rich instruction’, which ‘involves (1) spending time on the word; (2) explicitly exploring several aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; and (3) involving learners in thoughtfully and actively processing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 117). In instances like this, PTV is something of a misnomer. It’s just plain teaching, and is likely to need as much, or more, time than exploration of the text (which may be viewed as further practice of / exposure to the lexis).

If the text is primarily intended as lexical input, there is also a good case to be made for making the target items it contains more salient by, for example, highlighting them or putting them in bold (Choi, 2017). At the same time, if ‘PTV’ is to lead to lexical gains, these are likely to be augmented by post-reading tasks which also focus explicitly on the target items (Sonbul & Schmitt, 2010).

2 TALOs which contain a set of lexical items that are necessary for comprehension of the text, but not a core focus of the lesson (e.g. because they are low-frequency)

PTV is often time-consuming, and necessarily so if the instruction is rich. If it is largely restricted to matching items to meanings (e.g. through translation), it is likely to have little impact on vocabulary development, and its short-term impact on comprehension appears to be limited. Research suggests that the use of a glossary is more efficient, since learners will only refer to it when they need to (whereas PTV is likely to devote some time to some items that are known to some learners, and this takes place before the knowledge is required … and may therefore be forgotten in the interim). Glossaries lead to better comprehension (Alessi & Dwyer, 2008).

3 TAVIs

I don’t have any principled objection to the occasional use of texts as TALOs, but it seems fairly clear that a healthy textual diet for language learners will contain substantially more TAVIs than TALOs, substantially more extensive reading than intensive reading of the kind found in most coursebooks. If we focused less often on direct instruction of grammar (a change of emphasis which is long overdue), there would be less need for TALOs, anyway. With TAVIs, there seems to be no good reason for PTV: glossaries or digital dictionary look-up will do just fine.

However, one alternative justification and use of PTV is offered by Scott Thornbury. He suggests identifying a relatively small number of keywords from a text that will be needed for global understanding. Some of them may be unknown to the learners, and for these, learners use dictionaries to check meaning. Then, looking at the list of key words learners predict what the text will be about. The rationale here is that if learners engage with these words before encountering them in the text, it ‘may be an effective way of activating a learner’s schema for the text, and this may help to support comprehension’ (Ballance, 2018). However, as Ballance notes, describing this kind of activity as PTV would be something of a misnomer: it is a useful addition to a teacher’s repertoire of schema-activation activities (which might be used with both TAVIs and TALOs).

In short …

The big question about PTV, then, is not one of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s about the point of the activity. Balance (2018) offers a good summary:

‘In sum, for teachers to use PTV effectively, it is essential that they clearly identify a rationale for including PTV within a lesson, select the words to be taught in conjunction with this rationale and also design the vocabulary learning or development exercise in a manner that is commensurate with this rationale. The rationale should be the determining factor in the design of a PTV component within a lesson, and different rationales for using PTV naturally lead to markedly different selections of vocabulary items to be studied and different exercise designs.’

REFERENCES

Alessi, S. & Dwyer, A. (2008). Vocabulary assistance before and during reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2): pp. 246 – 263

Ballance, O. J. (2018). Strategies for pre-teaching vocabulary in context. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1-7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0732

Choi, S. (2017). Processing and learning of enhanced English collocations: An eye movement study. Language Teaching Research, 21, 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168816653271

File, K. A. & Adams, R. (2010). Should vocabulary instruction be integrated or isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 222–249.

Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson

Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1): pp. 1 – 19

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. & Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2021). The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers’ eye movements. Language Learning, 0 (0), 0-0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12430

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillan

Sonbul, S. & Schmitt, N. (2010). Direct teaching of vocabulary after reading: is it worth the effort? ELT Journal 64 (3): pp.253 – 260

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre‐learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (3): pp. 441–470.

Guessing meaning from context

In my last post , I looked at the use of digital dictionaries. This post is a sort of companion piece to that one.

I noted in that post that teachers are typically less keen on bilingual dictionaries (preferring monolingual versions) than their students. More generally, it seems that teachers are less keen on any kind of dictionary, preferring their students to attempt to work out the meaning of unknown words from context. Coursebooks invariably promote the skill of guessing meaning from context (also known as ‘lexical inferencing’) and some suggest that dictionary work should be banned from the classroom (Haynes & Baker, 1993, cited in Folse, 2004: 112). Teacher educators usually follow suit. Scott Thornbury, for example, has described guessing from context as ‘probably one of the most useful skills learners can acquire and apply both inside and outside the classroom’ (Thornbury, 2002: 148) and offers a series of steps to train learners in this skill before adding ‘when all else fails, consult a dictionary’. Dictionary use, then, is a last resort.

These steps are fairly well known and a typical example (from Clarke & Nation, 1980, cited in Webb & Nation, 2017: 169) is

1 Determine the part of speech of the unknown word

2 Analyse the immediate context to try to determine the meaning of the unknown word

3 Analyse the wider context to try to determine the meaning of the unknown word

4 Guess the meaning of the unknown word

5 Check the guess against the information that was found in the first four steps

It has been suggested that training in the use of this skill should be started at low levels, so that learners have a general strategy for dealing with unknown words. As proficiency develops, more specific instruction in the recognition and interpretation of context clues can be provided (Walters, 2006: 188). Training may include a demonstration by the teacher using a marked-up text, perhaps followed by ‘think-aloud’ sessions, where learners say out loud the step-by-step process they are going through when inferring meaning. It may also include a progression from, first, cloze exercises to, second, texts where highlighted words are provided with multiple choice definitions to, finally, texts with no support.

Although research has not established what kind of training is likely to be most effective, or whether specific training is more valuable than the provision of lots of opportunities to practise the skill, it would seem that this kind of work is likely to lead to gains in reading comprehension.

Besides the obvious value of this skill in helping learners to decode the meaning of unknown items in a text, it has been hypothesized that learners are ‘more likely to remember the form and meaning of a word when they have inferred its meaning by themselves than when the meaning has been given to them’ (Hulstijn, 1992). This is because memorisation is likely to be enhanced when mental effort has been exercised. The hypothesis was confirmed by Hulstijn in his 1992 study.

Unfortunately, Hulstijn’s study is not, in itself, sufficient evidence to prove the hypothesis. Other studies have shown the opposite. Keith Folse (2004: 112) cites a study by Knight (1994) which ‘found that subjects who used a bilingual dictionary while reading a passage not only learned more words but also achieved higher reading comprehension scores than subjects who did not have a dictionary and therefore had to rely on guessing from context clues’. More recently, Mokhtar & Rawian (2012) entitled their paper ‘Guessing Word Meaning from Context Has Its Limit: Why?’ They argue that ‘though it is not impossible for ESL learners to derive vocabulary meanings from context, guessing strategy by itself does not foster retention of meanings’.

What, then, are the issues here?

• First of all, Liu and Nation (1985) have estimated that learners ought to know at least 95 per cent of the context words in order to be able to infer meaning from context. Whilst this figure may not be totally accurate, it is clear that because ‘the more words you know, the more you are able to acquire new words’ (Prince, 1996), guessing from context is likely to work better with students at higher levels of proficiency than those with a lower level.
• Although exercises in coursebooks which require students to guess meaning from context have usually been written in such a way that it is actually possible to do so, ‘such a nicely packaged contextual environment is rare’ in the real world (Folse, 2004: 115). The skill of guessing from context may not be as useful as was previously assumed.
• There is clearly a risk that learners will guess wrong and, therefore, learn the wrong meaning. Nassaji (2003: 664) found in one study that learners guessed wrong more than half the time.
• Lastly, it appears that many learners do not like to employ this strategy, believing that using a dictionary is more useful to them and, possibly as a result of this attitude, fail to devote sufficient mental effort to it (Prince, 1996: 480).

Perhaps the most forceful critique of the promotion of guessing meaning from context has come from Catherine Walter and Michael Swan (2009), who referred to it as ‘an alleged ‘skill’’ and considered it, along with skimming and scanning, to be ‘mostly a waste of time’. Scott Thornbury (2006), in a marked departure from his comments (from a number of years earlier) quoted at the start of this post, also questioned the relevance of ‘guessing from context’ activities, arguing that, if students can employ a strategy such as inferring when reading their own language, they can transfer it to another language … so teachers are at risk of teaching their students what they already know.

To summarize, then, we might say that (1) the skill of guessing from context may not be as helpful in the real world as previously imagined, (2) it may not be as useful in acquiring vocabulary items as previously imagined. When a teacher is asked by a student for the meaning of a word in a text, the reflex response of ‘try to work it out from the context’ may also not be as helpful as previously imagined. Translations and / or dictionary advice may well, at times, be more appropriate.

References

Clarke, D.F. & Nation, I.S.P. 1980. ‘Guessing the meanings of words from context: Strategy and techniques.’ System, 8 (3): 211 -220

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Haynes, M. & Baker, I. 1993. ‘American and Chinese readers learning from lexical familiarization in English texts.’ In Huckin, T., Haynes, M. & Coady, J. (Eds.) Second Language Reading and Vocabulary Acquisition. Norwood, NJ.: Ablex. pp. 130 – 152

Hulstijn, J. 1992. ‘Retention of inferred and given word meanings: experiments in incidental vocabulary learning.’ In Arnaud, P. & Bejoint, H. (Eds.) Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics. London: Macmillan Academic and Professional Limited, pp. 113 – 125

Liu, N. & Nation, I. S. P. 1985. ‘Factors affecting guessing vocabulary in context.’ RELC Journal 16 (1): 33–42

Mokhtar, A. A. & Rawian, R. M. 2012. ‘Guessing Word Meaning from Context Has Its Limit: Why?’ International Journal of Linguistics 4 (2): 288 – 305

Nassaji, H. 2003. ‘L2 vocabulary learning from context: Strategies, knowledge sources, and their relationship with success in L2 lexical inferencing.’ TESOL Quarterly, 37(4): 645-670

Prince, P. 1996. ‘Second Language vocabulary Learning: The Role of Context versus Translations as a Function of Proficiency.’ The Modern Language Journal, 80(4): 478-493

Thornbury, S. 2002. How to Teach Vocabulary. Harlow: Pearson Education

Thornbury, S. 2006. The End of Reading? One Stop English,

Walter, C. & Swan, M. 2009. ‘Teaching reading skills: mostly a waste of time?’ In Beaven B. (Ed.) IATEFL 2008 Exeter Conference Selections. Canterbury: IATEFL, pp. 70-71

Walters, J.M. 2004. ‘Teaching the use of context to infer meaning: A longitudinal survey of L1 and L2 vocabulary research.’ Language Teaching, 37(4), pp. 243-252

Walters, J.D. 2006. ‘Methods of teaching inferring meaning from context.’ RELC Journal, 37(2), pp. 176-190

Webb, S. & Nation, P. 2017. How Vocabulary is Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press

 

Revising vocabulary #2

In the last post, I suggested a range of activities that could be used in class to ‘activate’ a set of vocabulary before doing more communicative revision / recycling practice. In this, I’ll be suggesting a variety of more communicative tasks. As before, the activities require zero or minimal preparation on the part of the teacher.
1 Simple word associations
Write on the board a large selection of words that you want to recycle. Choose one word (at random) and ask the class if they can find another word on the board that they can associate with it. Ask one volunteer to (1) say what the other word is and (2) explain the association they have found between the two words. Then, draw a line through the first word and ask students if they can now choose a third word that they can associate with the second. Again, the nominated volunteer must explain the connection between the two words. Then, draw a line through the second word and ask for a connection between the third and fourth words. After three examples like this, it should be clear to the class what they need to do. Put the students into pairs or small groups and tell them to continue until there are no more words left, or it becomes too difficult to find connections / associations between the words that are left. This activity can be done simply in pairs or it can be turned into a class / group game.
As a follow-up, you might like to rearrange the pairs or groups and get students to see how many of their connections they can remember. As they are listening to the ideas of other students, ask them to decide which of the associations they found the most memorable / entertaining / interesting.
2 Association circles (variation of activity #1)
Ask students to look through their word list or flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the items that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. Tell them to write these words in a circle on a sheet of paper.
Tell the students to choose, at random, one word in their circle. Next, they must find another word in the circle which they can associate in some way with the first word that they chose. They must explain this association to their partner. They must then find another word which they can associate with their second word. Again they must explain the association. They should continue in this way until they have connected all the words in their circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
3 Multiple associations
Using the same kind of circle of words, students again work with a partner. Starting with any word, they must find and explain an association with another word. Next, beginning with the word they first chose, they must find and explain an association with another word from the circle. They continue in this way until they have found connections between their first word and all the other words in the circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
4 Association dice
Prepare two lists (six in each list) of words that you want to recycle. Write these two lists on the board (list A and list B) with each word numbered 1 – 6. Each group in the class will need a dice.
First, demonstrate the activity with the whole class. Draw everyone’s attention to the two lists of the words on the board. Then roll a dice twice. Tell the students which numbers you have landed on. Explain that the first number corresponds to a word from List A and the second number to a word from List B. Think of and explain a connection / association between the two words. Organise the class into groups and ask them to continue playing the game.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask them if they had any combinations of words for which they found it hard to think of a connection / association. Elicit suggestions from the whole class.
5 Picture associations #1
You will need a set of approximately eight pictures for this activity. These should be visually interesting and can be randomly chosen. If you do not have a set of pictures, you could ask the students to flick through their coursebooks and find a set of images that they find interesting or attractive. Tell them to note the page numbers. Alternatively, you could use pictures from the classroom: these might include posters on the walls, views out of the window, a mental picture of the teacher’s desk, a mental picture generated by imagining the whiteboard as a mirror, etc.
In the procedure described below, the students select the items they wish to practise. However, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask the students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. The students should then find an association between each of the words on their list and one of the pictures that they select. They discuss their ideas with their partner, before comparing their ideas with a new partner.
6 Picture associations #2
Using the pictures and word lists (as in the activity above), students should select one picture, without telling their partner which picture they have selected. They should then look at the word list and choose four words from this list which they can associate with that picture. They then tell their four words to their partner, whose task is to guess which picture the other student was thinking of.
7 Rhyme associations
Prepare a list of approximately eight words that you want to recycle and write these on the board.
Ask the students to look at the words on the board. Tell them to work in pairs and find a word (in either English or their own language) which rhymes with each of the words on the list. If they cannot find a rhyming word, allow them to choose a word which sounds similar even if it is not a perfect rhyme.
The pairs should now find some sort of connection between each of the words on the list and their rhyming partners. When everyone has had enough time to find connections / associations, combine the pairs into groups of four, and ask them to exchange their ideas. Ask them to decide, for each word, which rhyming word and connection will be the most helpful in remembering this vocabulary.
Conduct feedback with the whole class.
8 Associations: truth and lies
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. Individually, they should then write a series of sentences which contain these words: the sentences can contain one, two, or more of their target words. Half of the sentences should contain true personal information; the other half should contain false personal information.
Students then work with a partner, read their sentences aloud, and the partner must decide which sentences are true and which are false.
9 Associations: questions and answers
Prepare a list of between 12 and 20 items that you want the students to practise. Write these on the board (in any order) or distribute them as a handout.
Demonstrate the activity with the whole class before putting students into pairs. Make a question beginning with Why / How do you … / Why / How did you … / Why / How were you … which includes one of the target items from the list. The questions can be rather strange or divorced from reality. For example, if one of the words on the list were ankle, you could ask How did you break your ankle yesterday? Pretend that you are wracking your brain to think of an answer while looking at the other words on the board. Then, provide an answer, using one of the other words from the list. For example, if one of the other words were upset, you might answer I was feeling very upset about something and I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I fell down some steps. If necessary, do another example with the whole class to ensure that everyone understand the activity.
Tell the students to work in pairs, taking it in turns to ask and answer questions in the same way.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask if there were any particularly strange questions or answers.
(I first came across a variation of this idea in a blog post by Alex Case ‘Playing with our Word Bag’
10 Associations: question and answer fortune telling
Prepare for yourself a list of items that you want to recycle. Number this list. (You will not need to show the list to anyone.)
Organise the class into pairs. Ask each pair to prepare four or five questions about the future. These questions could be personal or about the wider world around them. Give a few examples to make sure everyone understands: How many children will I have? What kind of job will I have five years from now? Who will win the next World Cup?
Tell the class that you have the answers to their questions. Hold up the list of words that you have prepared (without showing what is written on it). Elicit a question from one pair. Tell them that they must choose a number from 1 to X (depending on how many words you have on your list). Say the word aloud or write it on the board.
Tell the class that this is the answer to the question, but the answer must be ‘interpreted’. Ask the students to discuss in pairs the interpretation of the answer. You may need to demonstrate this the first time. If the question was How many children will I have? and the answer selected was precious, you might suggest that Your child will be very precious to you, but you will only have one. This activity requires a free imagination, and some classes will need some time to get used to the idea.
Continue with more questions and more answers selected blindly from the list, with students working in pairs to interpret these answers. Each time, conduct feedback with the whole class to find out who has the best interpretation.
11 Associations: narratives
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
This activity often works best if it is used as a follow-up to ‘Picture Associations’. The story that the students prepare and tell should be connected to the picture that they focused on.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words.
Still in pairs, they should prepare a short story which contains at least seven of the items in their list. After preparing their story, they should rehearse it before exchanging stories with another student / pair of students.
To extend this activity, the various stories can be ‘passed around’ the class in the manner of the game ‘Chinese Whispers’ (‘Broken Telephone’).
12 Associations: the sentence game
Prepare a list of approximately 25 items that you want the class to practise. Write these, in any order, on one side of the whiteboard.
Explain to the class that they are going to play a game. The object of the game is to score points by making grammatically correct sentences using the words on the board. If the students use just one of these words in a sentence, they will get one point. If they use two of the words, they’ll get two points. With three words, they’ll get three points. The more ambitious they are, the more points they can score. But if their sentence is incorrect, they will get no points and they will miss their turn. Tell the class that the sentences (1) must be grammatically correct, (2) must make logical sense, (3) must be single sentences. If there is a problem with a sentence, you, the teacher, will say that it is wrong, but you will not make a correction.
Put the class into groups of four students each. Give the groups some time to begin preparing sentences which contain one or more of the words from the list.
Ask a member from one group to come to the board and write one of the sentences they have prepared. If it is an appropriate sentence, award points. Cross out the word(s) that has been used from the list on the board: this word can no longer be used. If the sentence was incorrect, explain that there is a problem and turn to a member of the next group. This person can either (1) write a new sentence that their group has prepared, or (2) try, with the help of other members of their group to correct a sentence that is on the board. If their correction is correct, they score all the points for that sentence. If their correction is incorrect, they score no points and it is the end of their turn.
The game continues in this way with each group taking it in turns to make or correct sentences on the board.

(There are a number of comedy sketches about word associations. My favourite is this one. I’ve used it from time to time in presentations on this topic, but it has absolutely no pedagogical value (… unlike the next autoplay suggestion that was made for me, which has no comedy value).

Revising vocabulary #1

A few years ago, I wrote a couple of posts about the sorts of things that teachers can do in classrooms to encourage the use of vocabulary apps and to deepen the learning of the learning items. You can find these here and here. In this and a future post, I want to take this a little further. These activities will be useful and appropriate for any teachers wanting to recycle target vocabulary in the classroom.

The initial deliberate learning of vocabulary usually focuses on the study of word meanings (e.g. target items along with translations), but for these items to be absorbed into the learner’s active vocabulary store, learners will need opportunities to use them in meaningful ways. Classrooms can provide rich opportunities for this. However, before setting up activities that offer learners the chance to do this, teachers will need in some way to draw attention to the items that will be practised. The simplest way of doing this is simply to ask students to review, for a few minutes, the relevant word set in their vocabulary apps or the relevant section of the word list. Here are some more interesting alternatives.

The post after this will suggest a range of activities that promote communicative, meaningful use of the target items (after they have been ‘activated’ using one or more of the activities below).

1             Memory check

Ask the students to spend a few minutes reviewing the relevant word set in their vocabulary apps or the relevant section of the word list (up to about 20 items). Alternatively, project / write the target items on the board. After a minute or two, tell the students to stop looking at the target items. Clean the board, if necessary.

Tell students to work individually and write down all the items they can remember. Allow a minute or two. Then, put the students into pairs: tell them to (1) combine their lists, (2) check their spelling, (3) check that they can translate (or define) the items they have, and (4) add to the lists. After a few minutes, tell the pairs to compare their lists with the work of another pair. Finally, allow students to see the list of target items so they can see which words they forgot.

2             Simple dictation

Tell the class that they are going to do a simple dictation, and ask them to write the numbers 1 to X (depending on how many words you wish to recycle: about 15 is recommended) on a piece of paper or in their notebooks. Dictate the words. Tell the students to work with a partner and check (1) their spelling, and (2) that they can remember the meanings of these words. Allow the students to check their answers in the vocabulary app / a dictionary / their word list / their coursebook.

3             Missing vowels dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but tell the students that they must only write the consonants of the dictated words. When comparing their answers with a partner, they must reinsert the missing vowels.

4             Collocation dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but instead of single words, dictate simple collocations (e.g. verb – complement combinations, adjective – noun pairings, adverb – adjective pairings). Students write down the collocations. When comparing their answers with a partner, they have an additional task: dictate the collocations again and identify one word that the students must underline. In pairs, students must think of one or two different words that can collocate with the underlined word.

5             Simple translation dictation

As above (‘Simple dictation’), but tell the students that must only write down the translation into their own language of the word (or phrase) that you have given them. Afterwards, when they are working with a partner, they must write down the English word. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.)

6             Word count dictation

As above (‘Simple translation dictation’): when the students are doing the dictation, tell them that they must first silently count the number of letters in the English word and write down this number. They must also write down the translation into their own language. Afterwards, when they are working with a partner, they must write down the English word. As an addition / alternative, you can ask them to write down the first letter of the English word. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.)

I first came across this activity in Morgan, J. & M. Rinvolucri (2004) Vocabulary 2nd edition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

7             Dictations with tables

Before dictating the target items, draw a simple table on the board of three or more columns. At the top of each column, write the different stress patterns of the words you will dictate. Explain to the students that they must write the words you dictate into the appropriate column.

As an alternative to stress patterns, you could use different categories for the columns. Examples include: numbers of syllables, vowel sounds that feature in the target items, parts of speech, semantic fields, items that students are confident about / less confident about, etc.

8             Bilingual sentence dictation

Prepare a set of short sentences (eight maximum), each of which contains one of the words that you want to recycle. These sentences could be from a vocabulary exercise that the students have previously studied in their coursebooks or example sentences from vocab apps.

Tell the class that they are going to do a dictation. Tell them that you will read some sentences in English, but they must only write down translations into their own language of these sentences. Dictate the sentences, allowing ample time for students to write their translations. Put the students into pairs or small groups. Ask them to translate these sentences back into English. (This activity works well with multilingual groups – students do not need to speak the same language as their partner.) Conduct feedback with the whole class, or allow the students to check their answers with their apps / the coursebook.

From definitions (or translations) to words

An alternative to providing learners with the learning items and asking them to check the meanings is to get them to work towards the items from the meanings. There are a very wide variety of ways of doing this and a selection of these follows below.

9             Eliciting race

Prepare a list of words that you want to recycle. These lists will need to be printed on a handout. You will need at least two copies of this handout, but for some variations of the game you will need more copies.

Divide the class into two teams. Get one student from each team to come to the front of the class and hand them the list of words. Explain that their task is to elicit from their team each of the words on the list. They must not say the word that they are trying to elicit. The first team to produce the target word wins a point, and everyone moves on to the next word.

The race can also be played with students working in pairs. One student has the list and elicits from their partner.

10          Eliciting race against the clock

As above (‘Eliciting race’), but the race is played ‘against the clock’. The teams have different lists of words (or the same lists but in a different order). Set a time limit. How many words can be elicited in, say, three minutes?

11          Mime eliciting race

As above (‘Eliciting race’), but you can ask the students who are doing the eliciting to do this silently, using mime and gesture only. A further alternative is to get students to do the eliciting by drawing pictures (as in the game of Pictionary).

12          The fly-swatting game

Write the items to be reviewed all over the board. Divide the class into two teams. Taking turns, one member of each group comes to the board. Each of the students at the board is given a fly-swatter (if this is not possible, they can use the palms of their hands). Choose one of the items and define it in some way. The students must find the word and swat it. The first person to do so wins a point for their team. You will probably want to introduce a rule where students are only allowed one swat: this means that if they swat the wrong word, the other player can take as much time as they like (and consult with their tem members) before swatting a word.

13          Word grab

Prepare the target items on one or more sets of pieces of paper / card (one item per piece of paper). With a smallish class of about 8 students, one set is enough. With larger classes, prepare one set per group (of between 4 – 8 students). Students sit in a circle with the pieces of paper spread out on a table or on the floor in the middle. The teacher calls out the definitions and the students try to be the first person to grab the appropriate piece of paper.

As an alternative to this teacher-controlled version of the game, students can work in groups of three or four (more sets of pieces of paper will be needed). One student explains a word and the others compete to grab the right word. The student with the most words at the end is the ‘winner’. In order to cover a large number of items for recycling, each table can have a different set of words. Once a group of students has exhausted the words on their table, they can exchange tables with another group.

14          Word hold-up

The procedures above can be very loud and chaotic! For a calmer class, ensure that everyone (or every group) has a supply of blank pieces of paper. Do the eliciting yourself. The first student or team to hold up the correct answer on a piece of paper wins the point.

15          Original contexts

Find the words in the contexts in which they were originally presented (e.g. in the coursebook); write the sentences with gaps on the board (or prepare this for projection). First, students work with a partner to complete the gaps. Before checking that their answers are correct, insert the first letter of each missing word so students can check their own answers. If you wish, you may also add a second letter. Once the missing words have been checked, ask the students to try to find as many different alternatives (i.e. other words that will fit syntactically and semantically) as they can for the missing words they have just inserted.

Quick follow-up activities

16          Word grouping

Once the learning items for revision have been ‘activated’ using one of the activities above, you may wish to do a quick follow-up activity before moving on to more communicative practice. A simple task type is to ask students (in pairs, so that there is some discussion and sharing of ideas) to group the learning items in one or more ways. Here are a few suggestions for ways that students can be asked to group the words: (1) words they remembered easily / words they had forgotten; (2) words they like / dislike; (3) words they think will be useful to them / will not be useful to them; (4) words that remind them of a particular time or experience (or person) in their life; (5) words they would pack in their holiday bags / words they would put in the deep-freeze and forget about for the time being (thanks to Jeremy Harmer for this last idea).

Learning styles – the emperor with no clothes

All aboard …

The point of adaptive learning is that it can personalize learning. When we talk about personalization, mention of learning styles is rarely far away. Jose Ferreira of Knewton (but now ex-CEO Knewton) made his case for learning styles in a blog post that generated a superb and, for Ferreira, embarrassing  discussion in the comments that were subsequently deleted by Knewton. FluentU (which I reviewed here) clearly approves of learning styles, or at least sees them as a useful way to market their product, even though it is unclear how their product caters to different styles. Busuu claims to be ‘personalised to fit your style of learning’. Voxy, Inc. (according to their company overview) ‘operates a language learning platform that creates custom curricula for English language learners based on their interests, routines, goals, and learning styles’. Bliu Bliu (which I reviewed here) recommended, in a recent blog post, that learners should ‘find out their language learner type and use it to their advantage’ and suggests, as a starter, trying out ‘Bliu Bliu, where pretty much any learner can find what suits them best’. Memrise ‘uses clever science to adapt to your personal learning style’.  Duolingo’s learning tree ‘effectively rearranges itself to suit individual learning styles’ according to founder, Louis Von Ahn. This list could go on and on.

Learning styles are thriving in ELT coursebooks, too. Here are just three recent examples for learners of various ages. Today! by Todd, D. & Thompson, T. (Pearson, 2014) ‘shapes learning around individual students with graded difficulty practice for mixed-ability classes’ and ‘makes testing mixed-ability classes easier with tests that you can personalise to students’ abilities’.

Move  it! by Barraclough, C., Beddall, F., Stannett, K., Wildman, J. (Pearson, 2015) offers ‘personalized pathways [which] allow students to optimize their learning outcomes’ and a ‘complete assessment package to monitor students’ learning process’.

Open Mind Elementary (A2) 2nd edition by Rogers, M., Taylor-Knowles, J. & Taylor-Knowles, S. (Macmillan, 2014) has a whole page devoted to learning styles in the ‘Life Skills’ strand of the course. The scope and sequence describes it in the following terms: ‘Thinking about what you like to do to find your learning style and improve how you learn English’. Here’s the relevant section:

Methodology books offer more tips for ways that teachers can cater to different learning styles. Recent examples include Patrycja Kamińska’s  Learning Styles and Second Language Education (Cambridge Scholars, 2014), Tammy Gregersen & Peter D. MacIntyre’s Capitalizing on Language Learners’ Individuality (Multilingual Matters, 2014) and Marjorie Rosenberg’s Spotlight on Learning Styles (Delta Publishing, 2013). Teacher magazines show a continuing interest  in the topic. Humanising Language Teaching and English Teaching Professional are particularly keen. The British Council offers courses about learning styles and its Teaching English website has many articles and lesson plans on the subject (my favourite explains that your students will be more successful if you match your teaching style to their learning styles), as do the websites of all the major publishers. Most ELT conferences will also offer something on the topic.

How about language teaching qualifications and frameworks? The Cambridge English Teaching Framework contains a component entitled ‘Understanding learners’ and this specifies as the first part of the component a knowledge of concepts such as learning styles (e.g., visual, auditory, kinaesthetic), multiple intelligences, learning strategies, special needs, affect. Unsurprisingly, the Cambridge CELTA qualification requires successful candidates to demonstrate an awareness of the different learning styles and preferences that adults bring to learning English. The Cambridge DELTA requires successful candidates to accommodate learners according to their different abilities, motivations, and learning styles. The Eaquals Framework for Language Teacher Training and Development requires teachers at Development Phase 2 t0 have the skill of determining and anticipating learners’ language learning needs and learning styles at a range of levels, selecting appropriate ways of finding out about these.

Outside of ELT, learning styles also continue to thrive. Phil Newton (2015 ‘The learning styles myth is thriving in higher education’ Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1908) carried out a survey of educational publications  (higher education) between 2013 and 2016, and found that an overwhelming majority (89%) implicitly or directly endorse the use of learning styles. He also cites research showing that 93% of UK schoolteachers believe that ‘individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred Learning Style’, with similar figures in other countries. 72% of Higher Education institutions in the US teach ‘learning style theory’ as part of faculty development for online teachers. Advocates of learning styles in English language teaching are not alone.

But, unfortunately, …

In case you weren’t aware of it, there is a rather big problem with learning styles. There is a huge amount of research  which suggests that learning styles (and, in particular, teaching attempts to cater to learning styles) need to be approached with extreme scepticism. Much of this research was published long before the blog posts, advertising copy, books and teaching frameworks (listed above) were written.  What does this research have to tell us?

The first problem concerns learning styles taxonomies. There are three issues here: many people do not fit one particular style, the information used to assign people to styles is often inadequate, and there are so many different styles that it becomes cumbersome to link particular learners to particular styles (Kirschner, P. A. & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. 2013. ‘Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education’ Educational Psychologist, 48 / 3, 169-183). To summarise, given the lack of clarity as to which learning styles actually exist, it may be ‘neither viable nor justified’ for learning styles to form the basis of lesson planning (Hall, G. 2011. Exploring English Language Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge p.140). More detailed information about these issues can be found in the following sources:

Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E. & Ecclestone, K. 2004. Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. London: Learning and Skills Research Centre

Dembo, M. H. & Howard, K. 2007. Advice about the use of learning styles: a major myth in education. Journal of College Reading & Learning 37 / 2: 101 – 109

Kirschner, P. A. 2017. Stop propagating the learning styles myth. Computers & Education 106: 166 – 171

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, E. 2008. Learning styles concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9 / 3: 105 – 119

Riener, C. & Willingham, D. 2010. The myth of learning styles. Change – The Magazine of Higher Learning

The second problem concerns what Pashler et al refer to as the ‘meshing hypothesis’: the idea that instructional interventions can be effectively tailored to match particular learning styles. Pashler et al concluded that the available taxonomies of student types do not offer any valid help in deciding what kind of instruction to offer each individual. Even in 2008, their finding was not new. Back in 1978, a review of 15 studies that looked at attempts to match learning styles to approaches to first language reading instruction, concluded that modality preference ‘has not been found to interact significantly with the method of teaching’ (Tarver, Sara & M. M. Dawson. 1978. Modality preference and the teaching of reading. Journal of Learning Disabilities 11: 17 – 29). The following year, two other researchers concluded that [the assumption that one can improve instruction by matching materials to children’s modality strengths] appears to lack even minimal empirical support. (Arter, J.A. & Joseph A. Jenkins 1979 ‘Differential diagnosis-prescriptive teaching: A critical appraisal’ Review of Educational Research 49: 517-555). Fast forward 20 years to 1999, and Stahl (Different strokes for different folks?’ American Educator Fall 1999 pp. 1 – 5) was writing the reason researchers roll their eyes at learning styles is the utter failure to find that assessing children’s learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any effect on learning. The area with the most research has been the global and analytic styles […]. Over the past 30 years, the names of these styles have changed – from ‘visual’ to ‘global’ and from ‘auditory’ to ‘analytic’ – but the research results have not changed. For a recent evaluation of the practical applications of learning styles, have a look at Rogowsky, B. A., Calhoun, B. M. & Tallal, P. 2015. ‘Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method: Effects on Comprehension’ Journal of Educational Psychology 107 / 1: 64 – 78. Even David Kolb, the Big Daddy of learning styles, now concedes that there is no strong evidence that teachers should tailor their instruction to their student’s particular learning styles (reported in Glenn, D. 2009. ‘Matching teaching style to learning style may not help students’ The Chronicle of Higher Education). To summarise, the meshing hypothesis is entirely unsupported in the scientific literature. It is a myth (Howard-Jones, P. A. 2014. ‘Neuroscience and education: myths and messages’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience).

This brings me back to the blog posts, advertising blurb, coursebooks, methodology books and so on that continue to tout learning styles. The writers of these texts typically do not acknowledge that there’s a problem of any kind. Are they unaware of the research? Or are they aware of it, but choose not to acknowledge it? I suspect that the former is often the case with the app developers. But if the latter is the case, what  might those reasons be? In the case of teacher training specifications, the reason is probably practical. Changing a syllabus is an expensive and time-consuming operation. But in the case of some of the ELT writers, I suspect that they hang on in there because they so much want to believe.

As Newton (2015: 2) notes, intuitively, there is much that is attractive about the concept of Learning Styles. People are obviously different and Learning Styles appear to offer educators a way to accommodate individual learner differences.  Pashler et al (2009:107) add that another related factor that may play a role in the popularity of the learning-styles approach has to do with responsibility. If a person or a person’s child is not succeeding or excelling in school, it may be more comfortable for the person to think that the educational system, not the person or the child himself or herself, is responsible. That is, rather than attribute one’s lack of success to any lack of ability or effort on one’s part, it may be more appealing to think that the fault lies with instruction being inadequately tailored to one’s learning style. In that respect, there may be linkages to the self-esteem movement that became so influential, internationally, starting in the 1970s. There is no reason to doubt that many of those who espouse learning styles have good intentions.

No one, I think, seriously questions whether learners might not benefit from a wide variety of input styles and learning tasks. People are obviously different. MacIntyre et al (MacIntyre, P.D., Gregersen, T. & Clément, R. 2016. ‘Individual Differences’ in Hall, G. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp.310 – 323, p.319) suggest that teachers might consider instructional methods that allow them to capitalise on both variety and choice and also help learners find ways to do this for themselves inside and outside the classroom. Jill Hadfield (2006. ‘Teacher Education and Trainee Learning Style’ RELC Journal 37 / 3: 369 – 388) recommends that we design our learning tasks across the range of learning styles so that our trainees can move across the spectrum, experiencing both the comfort of matching and the challenge produced by mismatching. But this is not the same thing as claiming that identification of a particular learning style can lead to instructional decisions. The value of books like Rosenberg’s Spotlight on Learning Styles lies in the wide range of practical suggestions for varying teaching styles and tasks. They contain ideas of educational value: it is unfortunate that the theoretical background is so thin.

In ELT things are, perhaps, beginning to change. Russ Mayne’s blog post Learning styles: facts and fictions in 2012 got a few heads nodding, and he followed this up 2 years later with a presentation at IATEFL looking at various aspects of ELT, including learning styles, which have little or no scientific credibility. Carol Lethaby and Patricia Harries gave a talk at IATEFL 2016, Changing the way we approach learning styles in teacher education, which was also much discussed and shared online. They also had an article in ELT Journal called Learning styles and teacher training: are we perpetuating neuromyths? (2016 ELTJ 70 / 1: 16 – 27). Even Pearson, in a blog post of November 2016, (Mythbusters: A review of research on learning styles) acknowledges that there is a shocking lack of evidence to support the core learning styles claim that customizing instruction based on students’ preferred learning styles produces better learning than effective universal instruction, concluding that  it is impossible to recommend learning styles as an effective strategy for improving learning outcomes.

 

 

Word lists

Every now and then, someone recommends me to take a look at a flashcard app. It’s often interesting to see what developers have done with design, gamification and UX features, but the content is almost invariably awful. Most recently, I was encouraged to look at Word Pash. The screenshots below are from their promotional video.

   

The content problems are immediately apparent: an apparently random selection of target items, an apparently random mix of high and low frequency items, unidiomatic language examples, along with definitions and distractors that are less frequent than the target item. I don’t know if these are representative of the rest of the content. The examples seem to come from ‘Stage 1 Level 3’, whatever that means. (My confidence in the product was also damaged by the fact that the Word Pash website includes one testimonial from a certain ‘Janet Reed – Proud Mom’, whose son ‘was able to increase his score and qualify for academic scholarships at major universities’ after using the app. The picture accompanying ‘Janet Reed’ is a free stock image from Pexels and ‘Janet Reed’ is presumably fictional.)

According to the website, ‘WordPash is a free-to-play mobile app game for everyone in the global audience whether you are a 3rd grader or PhD, wordbuff or a student studying for their SATs, foreign student or international business person, you will become addicted to this fast paced word game’. On the basis of the promotional video, the app couldn’t be less appropriate for English language learners. It seems unlikely that it would help anyone improve their ACT or SAT test scores. The suggestion that the vocabulary development needs of 9-year-olds and doctoral students are comparable is pure chutzpah.

The deliberate study of more or less random words may be entertaining, but it’s unlikely to lead to very much in practical terms. For general purposes, the deliberate learning of the highest frequency words, up to about a frequency ranking of #7500, makes sense, because there’s a reasonably high probability that you’ll come across these items again before you’ve forgotten them. Beyond that frequency level, the value of the acquisition of an additional 1000 words tails off very quickly. Adding 1000 words from frequency ranking #8000 to #9000 is likely to result in an increase in lexical understanding of general purpose texts of about 0.2%. When we get to frequency ranks #19,000 to #20,000, the gain in understanding decreases to 0.01%[1]. In other words, deliberate vocabulary learning needs to be targeted. The data is relatively recent, but the principle goes back to at least the middle of the last century when Michael West argued that a principled approach to vocabulary development should be driven by a comparison of the usefulness of a word and its ‘learning cost’[2]. Three hundred years before that, Comenius had articulated something very similar: ‘in compiling vocabularies, my […] concern was to select the words in most frequent use’[3].

I’ll return to ‘general purposes’ later in this post, but, for now, we should remember that very few language learners actually study a language for general purposes. Globally, the vast majority of English language learners study English in an academic (school) context and their immediate needs are usually exam-specific. For them, general purpose frequency lists are unlikely to be adequate. If they are studying with a coursebook and are going to be tested on the lexical content of that book, they will need to use the wordlist that matches the book. Increasingly, publishers make such lists available and content producers for vocabulary apps like Quizlet and Memrise often use them. Many examinations, both national and international, also have accompanying wordlists. Examples of such lists produced by examination boards include the Cambridge English young learners’ exams (Starters, Movers and Flyers) and Cambridge English Preliminary. Other exams do not have official word lists, but reasonably reliable lists have been produced by third parties. Examples include Cambridge First, IELTS and SAT. There are, in addition, well-researched wordlists for academic English, including the Academic Word List (AWL)  and the Academic Vocabulary List  (AVL). All of these make sensible starting points for deliberate vocabulary learning.

When we turn to other, out-of-school learners the number of reasons for studying English is huge. Different learners have different lexical needs, and working with a general purpose frequency list may be, at least in part, a waste of time. EFL and ESL learners are likely to have very different needs, as will EFL and ESP learners, as will older and younger learners, learners in different parts of the world, learners who will find themselves in English-speaking countries and those who won’t, etc., etc. For some of these demographics, specialised corpora (from which frequency-based wordlists can be drawn) exist. For most learners, though, the ideal list simply does not exist. Either it will have to be created (requiring a significant amount of time and expertise[4]) or an available best-fit will have to suffice. Paul Nation, in his recent ‘Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing’ (John Benjamins, 2016) includes a useful chapter on critiquing wordlists. For anyone interested in better understanding the issues surrounding the development and use of wordlists, three good articles are freely available online. These are:

Lessard-Clouston, M. 2012 / 2013. ‘Word Lists for Vocabulary Learning and Teaching’ The CATESOL Journal 24.1: 287- 304

Lessard-Clouston, M. 2016. ‘Word lists and vocabulary teaching: options and suggestions’ Cornerstone ESL Conference 2016

Sorell, C. J. 2013. A study of issues and techniques for creating core vocabulary lists for English as an International Language. Doctoral thesis.

But, back to ‘general purposes’ …. Frequency lists are the obvious starting point for preparing a wordlist for deliberate learning, but they are very problematic. Frequency rankings depend on the corpus on which they are based and, since these are different, rankings vary from one list to another. Even drawing on just one corpus, rankings can be a little strange. In the British National Corpus, for example, ‘May’ (the month) is about twice as frequent as ‘August’[5], but we would be foolish to infer from this that the learning of ‘May’ should be prioritised over the learning of ‘August’. An even more striking example from the same corpus is the fact that ‘he’ is about twice as frequent as ‘she’[6]: should, therefore, ‘he’ be learnt before ‘she’?

List compilers have to make a number of judgement calls in their work. There is not space here to consider these in detail, but two particularly tricky questions concerning the way that words are chosen may be mentioned: Is a verb like ‘list’, with two different and unrelated meanings, one word or two? Should inflected forms be considered as separate words? The judgements are not usually informed by considerations of learners’ needs. Learners will probably best approach vocabulary development by building their store of word senses: attempting to learn all the meanings and related forms of any given word is unlikely to be either useful or successful.

Frequency lists, in other words, are not statements of scientific ‘fact’: they are interpretative documents. They have been compiled for descriptive purposes, not as ways of structuring vocabulary learning, and it cannot be assumed they will necessarily be appropriate for a purpose for which they were not designed.

A further major problem concerns the corpus on which the frequency list is based. Large databases, such as the British National Corpus or the Corpus of Contemporary American English, are collections of language used by native speakers in certain parts of the world, usually of a restricted social class. As such, they are of relatively little value to learners who will be using English in contexts that are not covered by the corpus. A context where English is a lingua franca is one such example.

A different kind of corpus is the Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC), a collection of exam scripts produced by candidates in Cambridge exams. This has led to the development of the English Vocabulary Profile (EVP) , where word senses are tagged as corresponding to particular levels in the Common European Framework scale. At first glance, this looks like a good alternative to frequency lists based on native-speaker corpora. But closer consideration reveals many problems. The design of examination tasks inevitably results in the production of language of a very different kind from that produced in other contexts. Many high frequency words simply do not appear in the CLC because it is unlikely that a candidate would use them in an exam. Other items are very frequent in this corpus just because they are likely to be produced in examination tasks. Unsurprisingly, frequency rankings in EVP do not correlate very well with frequency rankings from other corpora. The EVP, then, like other frequency lists, can only serve, at best, as a rough guide for the drawing up of target item vocabulary lists in general purpose apps or coursebooks[7].

There is no easy solution to the problems involved in devising suitable lexical content for the ‘global audience’. Tagging words to levels (i.e. grouping them into frequency bands) will always be problematic, unless very specific user groups are identified. Writers, like myself, of general purpose English language teaching materials are justifiably irritated by some publishers’ insistence on allocating words to levels with numerical values. The policy, taken to extremes (as is increasingly the case), has little to recommend it in linguistic terms. But it’s still a whole lot better than the aleatory content of apps like Word Pash.

[1] See Nation, I.S.P. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2nd edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 21 for statistical tables. See also Nation, P. & R. Waring 1997. ‘Vocabulary size, text coverage and word lists’ in Schmitt & McCarthy (eds.) 1997. Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 6 -19

[2] See Kelly, L.G. 1969. 25 Centuries of Language Teaching. (Rowley, Mass.: Rowley House) p.206 for a discussion of West’s ideas.

[3] Kelly, L.G. 1969. 25 Centuries of Language Teaching. (Rowley, Mass.: Rowley House) p. 184

[4] See Timmis, I. 2015. Corpus Linguistics for ELT (Abingdon: Routledge) for practical advice on doing this.

[5] Nation, I.S.P. 2016. Making and Using Word Lists for Language Learning and Testing. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins) p.58

[6] Taylor, J.R. 2012. The Mental Corpus. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p.151

[7] For a detailed critique of the limitations of using the CLC as a guide to syllabus design and textbook development, see Swan, M. 2014. ‘A Review of English Profile Studies’ ELTJ 68/1: 89-96

Vocabulary apps: organising the content

If you’re going to teach vocabulary, you need to organise it in some way. Almost invariably, this organisation is topical, with words grouped into what are called semantic sets. In coursebooks, the example below (from Rogers, M., Taylore-Knowles, J. & S. Taylor-Knowles. 2010. Open Mind Level 1. London: Macmillan, p.68) is fairly typical.

Coursebooks are almost always organised in a topical way. The example above comes in a unit (of 10 pages), entitled ‘You have talent!’, which contains two main vocabulary sections. It’s unsurprising to find a section called ‘personality adjectives’ in such a unit. What’s more, such an approach lends itself to the requisite, but largely, spurious ‘can-do’ statement in the self-evaluation section: I can talk about people’s positive qualities. We must have clearly identifiable learning outcomes, after all.

There is, undeniably, a certain intuitive logic in this approach. An alternative might entail a radical overhaul of coursebook architecture – this might not be such a bad thing, but might not go down too well in the markets. How else, after all, could the vocabulary strand of the syllabus be organised?

Well, there are a number of ways in which a vocabulary syllabus could be organised. Including the standard approach described above, here are four possibilities:

1 semantic sets (e.g. bee, butterfly, fly, mosquito, etc.)

2 thematic sets (e.g. ‘pets’: cat, hate, flea, feed, scratch, etc.)

3 unrelated sets

4 sets determined by a group of words’ occurrence in a particular text

Before reading further, you might like to guess what research has to say about the relative effectiveness of these four approaches.

The answer depends, to some extent, on the level of the learner. For advanced learners, it appears to make no, or little, difference (Al-Jabri, 2005, cited by Ellis & Shintani, 2014: 106). But, for the vast majority of English language learners (i.e. those at or below B2 level), the research is clear: the most effective way of organising vocabulary items to be learnt is by grouping them into thematic sets (2) or by mixing words together in a semantically unrelated way (3) – not by teaching sets like ‘personality adjectives’. It is surprising how surprising this finding is to so many teachers and materials writers. It goes back at least to 1988 and West’s article on ‘Catenizing’ in ELTJ, which argued that semantic grouping made little sense from a psycho-linguistic perspective. Since then, a large amount of research has taken place. This is succinctly summarised by Paul Nation (2013: 128) in the following terms: Avoid interference from related words. Words which are similar in form (Laufer, 1989) or meaning (Higa, 1963; Nation, 2000; Tinkham, 1993; Tinkham, 1997; Waring, 1997) are more difficult to learn together than they are to learn separately. For anyone who is interested, the most up-to-date review of this research that I can find is in chapter 11 of Barcroft (2105).

The message is clear. So clear that you have to wonder how it is not getting through to materials designers. Perhaps, coursebooks are different. They regularly eschew research findings for commercial reasons. But vocabulary apps? There is rarely, if ever, any pressure on the content-creation side of vocabulary apps (except those that are tied to coursebooks) to follow the popular misconceptions that characterise so many coursebooks. It wouldn’t be too hard to organise vocabulary into thematic sets (like, for example, the approach in the A2 level of Memrise German that I’m currently using). Is it simply because the developers of so many vocabulary apps just don’t know much about language learning?

References

Barcroft, J. 2015. Lexical Input Processing and Vocabulary Learning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Nation, I. S. P. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ellis, R. & N. Shintani, N. 2014. Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge

West, M. 1988. ‘Catenizing’ English Language Teaching Journal 6: 147 – 151

Analytics and ELT course materials

Back in December 2013, in an interview with eltjam , David Liu, COO of the adaptive learning company, Knewton, described how his company’s data analysis could help ELT publishers ‘create more effective learning materials’. He focused on what he calls ‘content efficacy[i]’ (he uses the word ‘efficacy’ five times in the interview), a term which he explains below:

A good example is when we look at the knowledge graph of our partners, which is a map of how concepts relate to other concepts and prerequisites within their product. There may be two or three prerequisites identified in a knowledge graph that a student needs to learn in order to understand a next concept. And when we have hundreds of thousands of students progressing through a course, we begin to understand the efficacy of those said prerequisites, which quite frankly were made by an author or set of authors. In most cases they’re quite good because these authors are actually good in what they do. But in a lot of cases we may find that one of those prerequisites actually is not necessary, and not proven to be useful in achieving true learning or understanding of the current concept that you’re trying to learn. This is interesting information that can be brought back to the publisher as they do revisions, as they actually begin to look at the content as a whole.

One commenter on the post, Tom Ewens, found the idea interesting. It could, potentially, he wrote, give us new insights into how languages are learned much in the same way as how corpora have given us new insights into how language is used. Did Knewton have any plans to disseminate the information publicly, he asked. His question remains unanswered.

At the time, Knewton had just raised $51 million (bringing their total venture capital funding to over $105 million). Now, 16 months later, Knewton have launched their new product, which they are calling Knewton Content Insights. They describe it as the world’s first and only web-based engine to automatically extract statistics comparing the relative quality of content items — enabling us to infer more information about student proficiency and content performance than ever before possible.

The software analyses particular exercises within the learning content (and particular items within them). It measures the relative difficulty of individual items by, for example, analysing how often a question is answered incorrectly and how many tries it takes each student to answer correctly. It also looks at what they call ‘exhaustion’ – how much content students are using in a particular area – and whether they run out of content. The software can correlate difficulty with exhaustion. Lastly, it analyses what they call ‘assessment quality’ – how well  individual questions assess a student’s understanding of a topic.

Knewton’s approach is premised on the idea that learning (in this case language learning) can be broken down into knowledge graphs, in which the information that needs to be learned can be arranged and presented hierarchically. The ‘granular’ concepts are then ‘delivered’ to the learner, and Knewton’s software can optimise the delivery. The first problem, as I explored in a previous post, is that language is a messy, complex system: it doesn’t lend itself terribly well to granularisation. The second problem is that language learning does not proceed in a linear, hierarchical way: it is also messy and complex. The third is that ‘language learning content’ cannot simply be delivered: a process of mediation is unavoidable. Are the people at Knewton unaware of the extensive literature devoted to the differences between synthetic and analytic syllabuses, of the differences between product-oriented and process-oriented approaches? It would seem so.

Knewton’s ‘Content Insights’ can only, at best, provide some sort of insight into the ‘language knowledge’ part of any learning content. It can say nothing about the work that learners do to practise language skills, since these are not susceptible to granularisation: you simply can’t take a piece of material that focuses on reading or listening and analyse its ‘content efficacy at the concept level’. Because of this, I predicted (in the post about Knowledge Graphs) that the likely focus of Knewton’s analytics would be discrete item, sentence-level grammar (typically tenses). It turns out that I was right.

Knewton illustrate their new product with screen shots such as those below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They give a specific example of the sort of questions their software can answer. It is: do students generally find the present simple tense easier to understand than the present perfect tense? Doh!

It may be the case that Knewton Content Insights might optimise the presentation of this kind of grammar, but optimisation of this presentation and practice is highly unlikely to have any impact on the rate of language acquisition. Students are typically required to study the present perfect at every level from ‘elementary’ upwards. They have to do this, not because the presentation in, say, Headway, is not optimised. What they need is to spend a significantly greater proportion of their time on ‘language use’ and less on ‘language knowledge’. This is not just my personal view: it has been extensively researched, and I am unaware of any dissenting voices.

The number-crunching in Knewton Content Insights is unlikely, therefore, to lead to any actionable insights. It is, however, very likely to lead (as writer colleagues at Pearson and other publishers are finding out) to an obsession with measuring the ‘efficacy’ of material which, quite simply, cannot meaningfully be measured in this way. It is likely to distract from much more pressing issues, notably the question of how we can move further and faster away from peddling sentence-level, discrete-item grammar.

In the long run, it is reasonable to predict that the attempt to optimise the delivery of language knowledge will come to be seen as an attempt to tackle the wrong question. It will make no significant difference to language learners and language learning. In the short term, how much time and money will be wasted?

[i] ‘Efficacy’ is the buzzword around which Pearson has built its materials creation strategy, a strategy which was launched around the same time as this interview. Pearson is a major investor in Knewton.