Self-paced listening

One of the most common criticisms of schooling is that it typically requires learners to study in lockstep, with everyone expected to use the same learning material at the same pace to achieve the same learning objectives. From everything we know about individual learner differences, this is an unreasonable and unrealisable expectation. It is only natural, therefore, that we should assume that self-paced learning is a better option. Self-paced learning is at the heart of technology-driven personalized learning. Often, it is the only meaningfully personalized aspect of technology-delivered courses.

Unfortunately, almost one hundred years of attempts to introduce elements of self-pacing into formal language instruction have failed to produce conclusive evidence of its benefits. For a more detailed look at the history of these failures, see my blog post on the topic, and for a more detailed look at Programmed Learning, a 1960s attempt to introduce self-pacing, see this post. This is not to say that self-pacing does not have a potentially important role to play. However, history should act as a warning that the simple provision of self-pacing opportunities through technology may be a necessary condition for successful self-pacing, but it is not a sufficient condition.

Of all the different areas of language learning that can be self-paced, I’ve long thought that technology might help the development of listening skills the most. Much contemporary real-world listening is, in any case, self-paced: why should the classroom not be? With online listening, we can use a variety of help options (Cross, 2017) – pause, rewind, speed control, speech-to-text, dictionary look-up, video / visual support – and we control the frequency and timing of this use. Online listening has become a ‘semi-recursive activity, less dependent on transient memory, inching its way closer to reading’ (Robin, 2007: 110). We don’t know which of these help options and which permutations of these options are most likely to lead to gains in listening skills, but it seems reasonable to believe that some of these options have strong potential. It is perhaps unlikely that research could ever provide a definitive answer to the question of optimal help options: different learners have different needs and different preferences (Cárdenas-Claros & Gruba, 2014). But what is clear is that self-pacing is necessary for these options to be used.

Moving away from whole-class lockstep listening practice towards self-paced independent listening has long been advocated by experts. John Field (2008: 47) identified a key advantage of independent listening: a learner ‘can replay the recording as often as she needs (achieving the kind of recursion that reading offers) and can focus upon specific stretches of the input which are difficult for her personally rather than for the class as a whole’. More recently, interest has also turned to the possibility of self-paced listening in assessment practices (Goodwin, 2017).

So, self-paced listening: what’s not to like? I’ve been pushing it with the teachers I work with for some time. But a recent piece of research from Kathrin Eberharter and colleagues (Eberharter et al., 2023) has given me pause for thought. The researchers wanted to know what effect self-pacing would have on the assessment of listening comprehension in a group of young teenage Austrian learners. They were particularly interested in how learners with SpLDs would be affected, and assumed that self-pacing would boost the performance of these learners. Disappointingly, they were wrong. Not only did self-pacing have, on average, no measurable impact on performance, it also seems that self-pacing may have put learners with shorter working-memory capacity and L1 literacy-related challenges at a disadvantage.

This research concerned self-paced listening in assessment (in this case the TOEFL Junior Standard test), not in learning. But might self-paced listening as part of a learning programme not be quite as beneficial as we might hope? The short answer, as ever, is probably that it depends. Eberhart et al speculate that young learners ‘might need explicit training and more practice in regulating their strategic listening behaviour in order to be able to improve their performance with the help of self-pacing’. This probably holds true for many older learners, too. In other words, it’s not the possibility of self-pacing in itself that will make a huge difference: it’s what a learner does or does not do while they are self-pacing that matters. To benefit from the technological affordances of online listening, learners need to know which strategies (and which tools) may help them. They may need ‘explicit training in exploiting the benefits of navigational freedom to enhance their metacognitive strategy use’ (Eberhart et al. 2023: 17). This shouldn’t surprise us: the role of metacognition is well established (Goh & Vandergrift, 2021).

As noted earlier, we do not really know which permutations of help options are likely to be of most help, but it is a relatively straightforward matter to encourage learners to experiment with them. We do, however, have a much clearer idea of the kinds of listening strategies that are likely to have a positive impact, and the most obvious way of providing this training is in the classroom. John Field (2008) suggested many approaches; Richard Cauldwell (2013) offers more; and Sheila Thorn’s recent ‘Integrating Authentic Listening into the Language Classroom’ (2021) adds yet more. If learners’ metacognitive knowledge, effective listening and help-option skills are going to develop, the training will need to involve ‘a cyclic approach […] throughout an entire course’ (Cross, 2017: 557).

If, on the other hand, our approach to listening in the classroom continues to be (as it is in so many coursebooks) one of testing listening through comprehension questions, we should not be too surprised when learners have little idea what strategy to approach when technology allows self-pacing. Self-paced self-testing of listening comprehension is likely to be of limited value.

References

Cárdenas-Claros, M. S. & Gruba, P. A. (2014) Listeners’ interactions with help options in CALL. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 27 (3): 228 – 245

Cauldwell, R. (2013) Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech. Speech in Action

Cross, J. (2017) Help options for L2 listening in CALL: A research agenda. Language Teaching, 50 (4), 544–560. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000209

Eberharter,K., Kormos, J.,  Guggenbichler, E.,  Ebner, V. S., Suzuki, S.,  Moser-Frötscher, D., Konrad, E. & Kremmel, B. (2023) Investigating the impact of self-pacing on the L2 listening performance of young learner candidates with differing L1 literacy skills. Language Testing 0 10.1177/02655322221149642 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/02655322221149642

Field, J. (2008) Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Goh, C. C. M. & Vandergrift, L. (2021) Teaching and learning second language listening: Metacognition in action (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429287749

Goodwin, S. J. (2017) Locus of control in L2 English listening assessment [Doctoral dissertation]. Georgia State University. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&context=alesl_diss

Robin, R. (2007) Commentary: Learner-based listening and technological authenticity. Language Learning & Technology, 11 (1): 109-115. https://www.lltjournal.org/item/461/

Thorn, S. (2021) Integrating Authentic Listening into the Language Classroom. Shoreham-by-Sea: Pavilion

Evaluating personalization

In my last post, I looked at the way that, in the absence of a clear, shared understanding of what ‘personalization’ means, it has come to be used as a slogan for the promoters of edtech. In this post, I want to look a little more closely at the constellation of meanings that are associated with the term, suggest a way of evaluating just how ‘personalized’ an instructional method might be, and look at recent research into ‘personalized learning’.

In English language teaching, ‘personalization’ often carries a rather different meaning than it does in broader educational discourse. Jeremy Harmer (Harmer, 2012: 276) defines it as ‘when students use language to talk about themselves and things which interest them’. Most commonly, this is in the context of ‘freer’ language practice of grammar or vocabulary of the following kind: ‘Complete the sentences so that they are true for you’. It is this meaning that Scott Thornbury refers to first in his entry for ‘Personalization’ in his ‘An A-Z of ELT’ (Thornbury, 2006: 160). He goes on, however, to expand his definition of the term to include humanistic approaches such as Community Language Learning / Counseling learning (CLL), where learners decide the content of a lesson, where they have agency. I imagine that no one would disagree that an approach such as this is more ‘personalized’ than a ‘complete-the-sentences-so-they-are-true-for you’ exercise to practise the present perfect.

Outside of ELT, ‘personalization’ has been used to refer to everything from ‘from customized interfaces to adaptive tutors, from student-centered classrooms to learning management systems’ (Bulger, 2016: 3). The graphic below (from Bulger, 2016: 3) illustrates just how wide the definitional reach of ‘personalization’ is.

As with Thornbury’s entry in his ‘A – Z of ELT’, it seems uncontentious to say that some things are more ‘personalized’ than others.

Given the current and historical problems with defining the term, it’s not surprising that a number of people have attempted to develop frameworks that can help us to get to grips with the thorny question of ‘personalization’. In the context of language teaching / learning, Renée Disick (Disick, 1975: 58) offered the following categorisation:

In a similar vein, a few years later, Howard Altman (Altman, 1980) suggested that teaching activities can differ in four main ways: the time allocated for learning, the curricular goal, the mode of learning and instructional expectations (personalized goal setting). He then offered eight permutations of these variables (see below, Altman, 1980: 9), although many more are imaginable.

Altman and Disick were writing, of course, long before our current technology-oriented view of ‘personalization’ became commonplace. The recent classification of technologically-enabled personalized learning systems by Monica Bulger (see below, Bulger, 2016: 6) reflects how times have changed.

Bulger’s classification focusses on the technology more than the learning, but her continuum is very much in keeping with the views of Disick and Altman. Some approaches are more personalized than others.

The extent to which choices are offered determines the degree of individualization in a particular program. (Disick, 1975: 5)

It is important to remember that learner-centered language teaching is not a point, but rather a continuum. (Altman, 1980: 6)

Larry Cuban has also recently begun to use a continuum as a way of understanding the practices of ‘personalization’ that he observes as part of his research. The overall goals of schooling at both ends of the curriculum are not dissimilar: helping ‘children grow into adults who are creative thinkers, help their communities, enter jobs and succeed in careers, and become thoughtful, mindful adults’.

As Cuban and others before him (e.g. Januszewski, 2001: 57) make clear, the two perspectives are not completely independent of each other. Nevertheless, we can see that one end of this continuum is likely to be materials-centred with the other learner-centred (Dickinson, 1987: 57). At one end, teachers (or their LMS replacements) are more likely to be content-providers and enact traditional roles. At the other, teachers’ roles are ‘more like those of coaches or facilitators’ (Cavanagh, 2014). In short, one end of the continuum is personalization for the learner; the other end is personalization by the learner.

It makes little sense, therefore, to talk about personalized learning as being a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing. We might perceive one form of personalized learning to be more personalized than another, but that does not mean it is any ‘better’ or more effective. The only possible approach is to consider and evaluate the different elements of personalization in an attempt to establish, first, from a theoretical point of view whether they are likely to lead to learning gains, and, second, from an evidence-based perspective whether any learning gains are measurable. In recent posts on this blog, I have been attempting to do that with elements such as learning styles , self-pacing and goal-setting.

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, none of the elements that we associate with ‘personalization’ will lead to clear, demonstrable learning gains. A report commissioned by the Gates Foundation (Pane et al, 2015) to find evidence of the efficacy of personalized learning did not, despite its subtitle (‘Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning’), manage to come up with any firm and unequivocal evidence (see Riley, 2017). ‘No single element of personalized learning was able to discriminate between the schools with the largest achievement effects and the others in the sample; however, we did identify groups of elements that, when present together, distinguished the success cases from others’, wrote the authors (Pane et al., 2015: 28). Undeterred, another report (Pane et al., 2017) was commissioned: in this the authors were unable to do better than a very hedged conclusion: ‘There is suggestive evidence that greater implementation of PL practices may be related to more positive effects on achievement; however, this finding requires confirmation through further research’ (my emphases). Don’t hold your breath!

In commissioning the reports, the Gates Foundation were probably asking the wrong question. The conceptual elasticity of the term ‘personalization’ makes its operationalization in any empirical study highly problematic. Meaningful comparison of empirical findings would, as David Hartley notes, be hard because ‘it is unlikely that any conceptual consistency would emerge across studies’ (Hartley, 2008: 378). The question of what works is unlikely to provide a useful (in the sense of actionable) response.

In a new white paper out this week, “A blueprint for breakthroughs,” Michael Horn and I argue that simply asking what works stops short of the real question at the heart of a truly personalized system: what works, for which students, in what circumstances? Without this level of specificity and understanding of contextual factors, we’ll be stuck understanding only what works on average despite aspirations to reach each individual student (not to mention mounting evidence that “average” itself is a flawed construct). Moreover, we’ll fail to unearth theories of why certain interventions work in certain circumstances. And without that theoretical underpinning, scaling personalized learning approaches with predictable quality will remain challenging. Otherwise, as more schools embrace personalized learning, at best each school will have to go at it alone and figure out by trial and error what works for each student. Worse still, if we don’t support better research, “personalized” schools could end up looking radically different but yielding similar results to our traditional system. In other words, we risk rushing ahead with promising structural changes inherent to personalized learning—reorganizing space, integrating technology tools, freeing up seat-time—without arming educators with reliable and specific information about how to personalize to their particular students or what to do, for which students, in what circumstances. (Freeland Fisher, 2016)

References

Altman, H.B. 1980. ‘Foreign language teaching: focus on the learner’ in Altman, H.B. & James, C.V. (eds.) 1980. Foreign Language Teaching: Meeting Individual Needs. Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp.1 – 16

Bulger, M. 2016. Personalized Learning: The Conversations We’re Not Having. New York: Data and Society Research Institute. https://www.datasociety.net/pubs/ecl/PersonalizedLearning_primer_2016.pdf

Cavanagh, S. 2014. ‘What Is ‘Personalized Learning’? Educators Seek Clarity’ Education Week http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/22/09pl-overview.h34.html

Dickinson, L. 1987. Self-instruction in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Disick, R.S. 1975 Individualizing Language Instruction: Strategies and Methods. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Freeland Fisher, J. 2016. ‘The inconvenient truth about personalized learning’ [Blog post] retrieved from http://www.christenseninstitute.org/blog/the-inconvenient-truth-about-personalized-learning/ (May 4, 2016)

Harmer, J. 2012. Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson Education

Hartley, D. 2008. ‘Education, Markets and the Pedagogy of Personalisation’ British Journal of Educational Studies 56 / 4: 365 – 381

Januszewski, A. 2001. Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited

Pane, J. F., Steiner, E. D., Baird, M. D. & Hamilton, L. S. 2015. Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning. Seattle: Rand Corporation retrieved from http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1365.html

Pane, J.F., Steiner, E. D., Baird, M. D., Hamilton, L. S. & Pane, J.D. 2017. Informing Progress: Insights on Personalized Learning Implementation and Effects. Seattle: Rand Corporation retrieved from https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2042.html

Riley, B. 2017. ‘Personalization vs. How People Learn’ Educational Leadership 74 / 6: 68-73

Thornbury, S. 2006. An A – Z of ELT. Oxford: Macmillan Education

 

 

 

Personalization and goal-setting

Introduction

In the last post, I looked at issues concerning self-pacing in personalized language learning programmes. This time, I turn to personalized goal-setting. Most definitions of personalized learning, such as that offered by Next Generation Learning Challenges http://nextgenlearning.org/ (a non-profit supported by Educause, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, among others), argue that ‘the default perspective [should be] the student’s—not the curriculum, or the teacher, and that schools need to adjust to accommodate not only students’ academic strengths and weaknesses, but also their interests, and what motivates them to succeed.’ It’s a perspective shared by the United States National Education Technology Plan 2017 https://tech.ed.gov/netp/ , which promotes the idea that learning objectives should vary based on learner needs, and should often be self-initiated. It’s shared by the massively funded Facebook initiative that is developing software that ‘puts students in charge of their lesson plans’, as the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/technology/facebook-helps-develop-software-that-puts-students-in-charge-of-their-lesson-plans.html?_r=0 put it. How, precisely, personalized goal-setting can be squared with standardized, high-stakes testing is less than clear. Are they incompatible by any chance?

In language learning, the idea that learners should have some say in what they are learning is not new, going back, at least, to the humanistic turn in the 1970s. Wilga Rivers advocated ‘giving the students opportunity to choose what they want to learn’ (Rivers, 1971: 165). A few years later, Renee Disick argued that the extent to which a learning programme can be called personalized (although she used the term ‘individualized’) depends on the extent to which learners have a say in the choice of learning objectives and the content of learning (Disick, 1975). Coming more up to date, Penny Ur advocated giving learners ‘a measure of freedom to choose how and what to learn’ (Ur, 1996: 233).

The benefits of personalized goal-setting

Personalized goal-setting is closely related to learner autonomy and learner agency. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any meaningful sense of learner autonomy or agency without some control of learning objectives. Without this control, it will be harder for learners to develop an L2 self. This matters because ‘ultimate attainment in second-language learning relies on one’s agency … [it] is crucial at the point where the individuals must not just start memorizing a dozen new words and expressions but have to decide on whether to initiate a long, painful, inexhaustive, and, for some, never-ending process of self-translation. (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000: 169 – 170). Put bluntly, if learners ‘have some responsibility for their own learning, they are more likely to be engaged than if they are just doing what the teacher tells them to’ (Harmer, 2012: 90). A degree of autonomy should lead to increased motivation which, in turn, should lead to increased achievement (Dickinson, 1987: 32; Cordova & Lepper, 1996: 726).

Strong evidence for these claims is not easy to provide, not least since autonomy and agency cannot be measured. However, ‘negative evidence clearly shows that a lack of agency can stifle learning by denying learners control over aspects of the language-learning process’ (Vandergriff, 2016: 91). Most language teachers (especially in compulsory education) have witnessed the negative effects that a lack of agency can generate in some students. Irrespective of the extent to which students are allowed to influence learning objectives, the desirability of agency / autonomy appears to be ‘deeply embedded in the professional consciousness of the ELT community’ (Borg and Al-Busaidi, 2012; Benson, 2016: 341). Personalized goal-setting may not, for a host of reasons, be possible in a particular learning / teaching context, but in principle it would seem to be a ‘good thing’.

Goal-setting and technology

The idea that learners might learn more and better if allowed to set their own learning objectives is hardly new, dating back at least one hundred years to the establishment of Montessori’s first Casa dei Bambini. In language teaching, the interest in personalized learning that developed in the 1970s (see my previous post) led to numerous classroom experiments in personalized goal-setting. These did not result in lasting changes, not least because the workload of teachers became ‘overwhelming’ (Disick, 1975: 128).

Closely related was the establishment of ‘self-access centres’. It was clear to anyone, like myself, who was involved in the setting-up and maintenance of a self-access centre, that they cost a lot, in terms of both money and work (Ur, 2012: 236). But there were also nagging questions about how effective they were (Morrison, 2005). Even more problematic was a bigger question: did they actually promote the learner autonomy that was their main goal?

Post-2000, online technology rendered self-access centres redundant: who needs the ‘walled garden’ of a self-access centre when ‘learners are able to connect with multiple resources and communities via the World Wide Web in entirely individual ways’ (Reinders, 2012)? The cost problem of self-access centres was solved by the web. Readily available now were ‘myriad digital devices, software, and learning platforms offering educators a once-unimaginable array of options for tailoring lessons to students’ needs’ (Cavanagh, 2014). Not only that … online technology promised to grant agency, to ‘empower language learners to take charge of their own learning’ and ‘to provide opportunities for learners to develop their L2 voice’ (Vandergriff, 2016: 32). The dream of personalized learning has become inseparable from the affordances of educational technologies.

It is, however, striking just how few online modes of language learning offer any degree of personalized goal-setting. Take a look at some of the big providers – Voxy, Busuu, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone or Babbel, for example – and you will find only the most token nods to personalized learning objectives. Course providers appear to be more interested in claiming their products are personalized (‘You decide what you want to learn and when!’) than in developing a sufficient amount of content to permit personalized goal-setting. We are left with the ELT equivalent of personalized cans of Coke: a marketing tool.

The problems with personalized goal-setting

Would language learning products, such as those mentioned above, be measurably any better if they did facilitate the personalization of learning objectives in a significant way? Would they be able to promote learner autonomy and agency in a way that self-access centres apparently failed to achieve? It’s time to consider the square quotes that I put around ‘good thing’.

Researchers have identified a number of potential problems with goal-setting. I have already mentioned the problem of reconciling personalized goals and standardized testing. In most learning contexts, educational authorities (usually the state) regulate the curriculum and determine assessment practices. It is difficult to see, as Campbell et al. (Campbell et al., 2007: 138) point out, how such regulation ‘could allow individual interpretations of the goals and values of education’. Most assessment systems ‘aim at convergent outcomes and homogeneity’ (Benson, 2016: 345) and this is especially true of online platforms, irrespective of their claims to ‘personalization’. In weak (typically internal) assessment systems, the potential for autonomy is strongest, but these are rare.

In all contexts, it is likely that personalized goal-setting will only lead to learning gains when a number of conditions are met. The goals that are chosen need to be both specific, measurable, challenging and non-conflicting (Ordóñez et al. 2009: 2-3). They need to be realistic: if not, it is unlikely that self-efficacy (a person’s belief about their own capability to achieve or perform to a certain level) will be promoted (Koda-Dallow & Hobbs, 2005), and without self-efficacy, improved performance is also unlikely (Bandura, 1997). The problem is that many learners lack self-efficacy and are poor self-regulators. These things are teachable / learnable, but require time and support. Many learners need help in ‘becoming aware of themselves and their own understandings’ (McMahon & Oliver, 2001: 1304). If they do not get it, the potential advantages of personalized goal-setting will be negated. As learners become better self-regulators, they will want and need to redefine their learning goals: goal-setting should be an iterative process (Hussey & Smith, 2003: 358). Again, support will be needed. In online learning, such support is not common.

A further problem that has been identified is that goal-setting can discourage a focus on non-goal areas (Ordóñez et al. 2009: 2) and can lead to ‘a focus on reaching the goal rather than on acquiring the skills required to reach it’ (Locke & Latham, 2006: 266). We know that much language learning is messy and incidental. Students do not only learn the particular thing that they are studying at the time (the belief that they do was described by Dewey as ‘the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies’). Goal-setting, even when personalized, runs the risk of promoting tunnel-vision.

The incorporation of personalized goal-setting in online language learning programmes is, in so many ways, a far from straightforward matter. Simply tacking it onto existing programmes is unlikely to result in anything positive: it is not an ‘over-the-counter treatment for motivation’ (Ordóñez et al.:2). Course developers will need to look at ‘the complex interplay between goal-setting and organizational contexts’ (Ordóñez et al. 2009: 16). Motivating students is not simply ‘a matter of the teacher deploying the correct strategies […] it is an intensely interactive process’ (Lamb, M. 2017). More generally, developers need to move away from a positivist and linear view of learning as a technical process where teaching interventions (such as the incorporation of goal-setting, the deployment of gamification elements or the use of a particular algorithm) will lead to predictable student outcomes. As Larry Cuban reminds us, ‘no persuasive body of evidence exists yet to confirm that belief (Cuban, 1986: 88). The most recent research into personalized learning has failed to identify any single element of personalization that can be clearly correlated with improved outcomes (Pane et al., 2015: 28).

In previous posts, I considered learning styles and self-pacing, two aspects of personalized learning that are highly problematic. Personalized goal-setting is no less so.

References

Bandura, A. 1997. Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company

Benson, P. 2016. ‘Learner Autonomy’ in Hall, G. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching. Abingdon: Routledge. pp.339 – 352

Borg, S. & Al-Busaidi, S. 2012. ‘Teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding learner autonomy’ ELT Journal 66 / 3: 283 – 292

Cavanagh, S. 2014. ‘What Is ‘Personalized Learning’? Educators Seek Clarity’ Education Week http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/10/22/09pl-overview.h34.html

Cordova, D. I. & Lepper, M. R. 1996. ‘Intrinsic Motivation and the Process of Learning: Beneficial Effects of Contextualization, Personalization, and Choice’ Journal of Educational Psychology 88 / 4: 715 -739

Cuban, L. 1986. Teachers and Machines. New York: Teachers College Press

Dickinson, L. 1987. Self-instruction in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Disick, R.S. 1975 Individualizing Language Instruction: Strategies and Methods. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Harmer, J. 2012. Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson Education

Hussey, T. & Smith, P. 2003. ‘The Uses of Learning Outcomes’ Teaching in Higher Education 8 / 3: 357 – 368

Lamb, M. 2017 (in press) ‘The motivational dimension of language teaching’ Language Teaching 50 / 3

Locke, E. A. & Latham, G. P. 2006. ‘New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory’ Current Directions in Psychological Science 15 / 5: 265 – 268

McMahon, M. & Oliver, R. (2001). Promoting self-regulated learning in an on-line environment. In C. Montgomerie & J. Viteli (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2001 (pp. 1299-1305). Chesapeake, VA: AACE

Morrison, B. 2005. ‘Evaluating learning gain in a self-access learning centre’ Language Teaching Research 9 / 3: 267 – 293

Ordóñez, L. D., Schweitzer, M. E., Galinsky, A. D. & Bazerman, M. H. 2009. Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting. Harvard Business School Working Paper 09-083

Pane, J. F., Steiner, E. D., Baird, M. D. & Hamilton, L. S. 2015. Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning. Seattle: Rand Corporation

Pavlenko, A. & Lantolf, J. P. 2000. ‘Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves’ In J.P. Lantolf (ed.), Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 155 – 177

Reinders, H. 2012. ‘The end of self-access? From walled garden to public park’ ELT World Online 4: 1 – 5

Rivers, W. M. 1971. ‘Techniques for Developing Proficiency in the Spoken Language in an Individualized Foreign Language program’ in Altman, H.B. & Politzer, R.L. (eds.) 1971. Individualizing Foreign Language Instruction: Proceedings of the Stanford Conference, May 6 – 8, 1971. Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. pp. 165 – 169

Ur, P. 1996. A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ur, P. 2012. A Course in English Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Vandergriff, I. Second-language Discourse in the Digital World. 2016. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Self-paced language learning

Introduction

Allowing learners to determine the amount of time they spend studying, and, therefore (in theory at least) the speed of their progress is a key feature of most personalized learning programs. In cases where learners follow a linear path of pre-determined learning items, it is often the only element of personalization that the programs offer. In the Duolingo program that I am using, there are basically only two things that can be personalized: the amount of time I spend studying each day, and the possibility of jumping a number of learning items by ‘testing out’.

Self-regulated learning or self-pacing, as this is commonly referred to, has enormous intuitive appeal. It is clear that different people learn different things at different rates. We’ve known for a long time that ‘the developmental stages of child growth and the individual differences among learners make it impossible to impose a single and ‘correct’ sequence on all curricula’ (Stern, 1983: 439). It therefore follows that it makes even less sense for a group of students (typically determined by age) to be obliged to follow the same curriculum at the same pace in a one-size-fits-all approach. We have probably all experienced, as students, the frustration of being behind, or ahead of, the rest of our colleagues in a class. One student who suffered from the lockstep approach was Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy. He has described how he was fed up with having to follow an educational path dictated by his age and how, as a result, individual pacing became an important element in his educational approach (Ferster, 2014: 132-133). As teachers, we have all experienced the challenges of teaching a piece of material that is too hard or too easy for many of the students in the class.

Historical attempts to facilitate self-paced learning

An interest in self-paced learning can be traced back to the growth of mass schooling and age-graded classes in the 19^th century. In fact, the ‘factory model’ of education has never existed without critics who saw the inherent problems of imposing uniformity on groups of individuals. These critics were not marginal characters. Charles Eliot (president of Harvard from 1869 – 1909), for example, described uniformity as ‘the curse of American schools’ and argued that ‘the process of instructing students in large groups is a quite sufficient school evil without clinging to its twin evil, an inflexible program of studies’ (Grittner, 1975: 324).

Attempts to develop practical solutions were not uncommon and these are reasonably well-documented. One of the earliest, which ran from 1884 to 1894, was launched in Pueblo, Colorado and was ‘a self-paced plan that required each student to complete a sequence of lessons on an individual basis’ (Januszewski, 2001: 58-59). More ambitious was the Burk Plan (at its peak between 1912 and 1915), named after Frederick Burk of the San Francisco State Normal School, which aimed to allow students to progress through materials (including language instruction materials) at their own pace with only a limited amount of teacher presentations (Januszewski, ibid.). Then, there was the Winnetka Plan (1920s), developed by Carlton Washburne, an associate of Frederick Burk and the superintendent of public schools in Winnetka, Illinois, which also ‘allowed learners to proceed at different rates, but also recognised that learners proceed at different rates in different subjects’ (Saettler, 1990: 65). The Winnetka Plan is especially interesting in the way it presaged contemporary attempts to facilitate individualized, self-paced learning. It was described by its developers in the following terms:

A general technique [consisting] of (a) breaking up the common essentials curriculum into very definite units of achievement, (b) using complete diagnostic tests to determine whether a child has mastered each of these units, and, if not, just where his difficulties lie and, (c) the full use of self-instructive, self corrective practice materials. (Washburne, C., Vogel, M. & W.S. Gray. 1926. A Survey of the Winnetka Public Schools. Bloomington, IL: Public School Press)

Not dissimilar was the Dalton (Massachusetts) Plan in the 1920s which also used a self-paced program to accommodate the different ability levels of the children and deployed contractual agreements between students and teachers (something that remains common educational practice around the world). There were many others, both in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

The personalization of learning through self-pacing was not, therefore, a minor interest. Between 1910 and 1924, nearly 500 articles can be documented on the subject of individualization (Grittner, 1975: 328). In just three years (1929 – 1932) of one publication, The Education Digest, there were fifty-one articles dealing with individual instruction and sixty-three entries treating individual differences (Chastain, 1975: 334). Foreign language teaching did not feature significantly in these early attempts to facilitate self-pacing, but see the Burk Plan described above. Only a handful of references to language learning and self-pacing appeared in articles between 1916 and 1924 (Grittner, 1975: 328).

Disappointingly, none of these initiatives lasted long. Both costs and management issues had been significantly underestimated. Plans such as those described above were seen as progress, but not the hoped-for solution. Problems included the fact that the materials themselves were not individualized and instructional methods were too rigid (Pendleton, 1930: 199). However, concomitant with the interest in individualization (mostly, self-pacing), came the advent of educational technology.

Sidney L. Pressey, the inventor of what was arguably the first teaching machine, was inspired by his experiences with schoolchildren in rural Indiana in the 1920s where he ‘was struck by the tremendous variation in their academic abilities and how they were forced to progress together at a slow, lockstep pace that did not serve all students well’ (Ferster, 2014: 52). Although Pressey failed in his attempts to promote his teaching machines, he laid the foundation stones in the synthesizing of individualization and technology.

Pressey may be seen as the direct precursor of programmed instruction, now closely associated with B. F. Skinner (see my post on Behaviourism and Adaptive Learning). It is a quintessentially self-paced approach and is described by John Hattie as follows:

Programmed instruction is a teaching method of presenting new subject matter to students in graded sequence of controlled steps. A book version, for example, presents a problem or issue, then, depending on the student’s answer to a question about the material, the student chooses from optional answers which refers them to particular pages of the book to find out why they were correct or incorrect – and then proceed to the next part of the problem or issue. (Hattie, 2009: 231)

Programmed instruction was mostly used for the teaching of mathematics, but it is estimated that 4% of programmed instruction programs were for foreign languages (Saettler, 1990: 297). It flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, but even by 1968 foreign language instructors were sceptical (Valdman, 1968). A survey carried out by the Center for Applied Linguistics revealed then that only about 10% of foreign language teachers at college and university reported the use of programmed materials in their departments. (Valdman, 1968: 1).

Research studies had failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of programmed instruction (Saettler, 1990: 303). Teachers were often resistant and students were often bored, finding ‘ingenious ways to circumvent the program, including the destruction of their teaching machines!’ (Saettler, ibid.).

In the case of language learning, there were other problems. For programmed instruction to have any chance of working, it was necessary to specify rigorously the initial and terminal behaviours of the learner so that the intermediate steps leading from the former to the latter could be programmed. As Valdman (1968: 4) pointed out, this is highly problematic when it comes to languages (a point that I have made repeatedly in this blog). In addition, students missed the personal interaction that conventional instruction offered, got bored and lacked motivation (Valdman, 1968: 10).

Programmed instruction worked best when teachers were very enthusiastic, but perhaps the most significant lesson to be learned from the experiments was that it was ‘a difficult, time-consuming task to introduce programmed instruction’ (Saettler, 1990: 299). It entailed changes to well-established practices and attitudes, and for such changes to succeed there must be consideration of the social, political, and economic contexts. As Saettler (1990: 306), notes, ‘without the support of the community and the entire teaching staff, sustained innovation is unlikely’. In this light, Hattie’s research finding that ‘when comparisons are made between many methods, programmed instruction often comes near the bottom’ (Hattie, 2009: 231) comes as no great surprise.

Just as programmed instruction was in its death throes, the world of language teaching discovered individualization. Launched as a deliberate movement in the early 1970s at the Stanford Conference (Altman & Politzer, 1971), it was a ‘systematic attempt to allow for individual differences in language learning’ (Stern, 1983: 387). Inspired, in part, by the work of Carl Rogers, this ‘humanistic turn’ was a recognition that ‘each learner is unique in personality, abilities, and needs. Education must be personalized to fit the individual; the individual must not be dehumanized in order to meet the needs of an impersonal school system’ (Disick, 1975:38). In ELT, this movement found many adherents and remains extremely influential to this day.

In language teaching more generally, the movement lost impetus after a few years, ‘probably because its advocates had underestimated the magnitude of the task they had set themselves in trying to match individual learner characteristics with appropriate teaching techniques’ (Stern, 1983: 387). What precisely was meant by individualization was never adequately defined or agreed (a problem that remains to the present time). What was left was self-pacing. In 1975, it was reported that ‘to date the majority of the programs in second-language education have been characterized by a self-pacing format […]. Practice seems to indicate that ‘individualized’ instruction is being defined in the class room as students studying individually’ (Chastain, 1975: 344).

Lessons to be learned

This brief account shows that historical attempts to facilitate self-pacing have largely been characterised by failure. The starting point of all these attempts remains as valid as ever, but it is clear that practical solutions are less than simple. To avoid the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, we should perhaps try to learn from the past.

One of the greatest challenges that teachers face is dealing with different levels of ability in their classes. In any blended scenario where the online component has an element of self-pacing, the challenge will be magnified as ability differentials are likely to grow rather than decrease as a result of the self-pacing. Bart Simpson hit the nail on the head in a memorable line: ‘Let me get this straight. We’re behind the rest of the class and we’re going to catch up to them by going slower than they are? Coo coo!’ Self-pacing runs into immediate difficulties when it comes up against standardised tests and national or state curriculum requirements. As Ferster observes, ‘the notion of individual pacing [remains] antithetical to […] a graded classroom system, which has been the model of schools for the past century. Schools are just not equipped to deal with students who do not learn in age-processed groups, even if this system is clearly one that consistently fails its students (Ferster, 2014: 90-91).

Ability differences are less problematic if the teacher focusses primarily on communicative tasks in F2F time (as opposed to more teaching of language items), but this is a big ‘if’. Many teachers are unsure of how to move towards a more communicative style of teaching, not least in large classes in compulsory schooling. Since there are strong arguments that students would benefit from a more communicative, less transmission-oriented approach anyway, it makes sense to focus institutional resources on equipping teachers with the necessary skills, as well as providing support, before a shift to a blended, more self-paced approach is implemented.

Such issues are less important in private institutions, which are not age-graded, and in self-study contexts. However, even here there may be reasons to proceed cautiously before buying into self-paced approaches. Self-pacing is closely tied to autonomous goal-setting (which I will look at in more detail in another post). Both require a degree of self-awareness at a cognitive and emotional level (McMahon & Oliver, 2001), but not all students have such self-awareness (Magill, 2008). If students do not have the appropriate self-regulatory strategies and are simply left to pace themselves, there is a chance that they will ‘misregulate their learning, exerting control in a misguided or counterproductive fashion and not achieving the desired result’ (Kirschner & van Merriënboer, 2013: 177). Before launching students on a path of self-paced language study, ‘thought needs to be given to the process involved in users becoming aware of themselves and their own understandings’ (McMahon & Oliver, 2001: 1304). Without training and support provided both before and during the self-paced study, the chances of dropping out are high (as we see from the very high attrition rate in language apps).

However well-intentioned, many past attempts to facilitate self-pacing have also suffered from the poor quality of the learning materials. The focus was more on the technology of delivery, and this remains the case today, as many posts on this blog illustrate. Contemporary companies offering language learning programmes show relatively little interest in the content of the learning (take Duolingo as an example). Few app developers show signs of investing in experienced curriculum specialists or materials writers. Glossy photos, contemporary videos, good UX and clever gamification, all of which become dull and repetitive after a while, do not compensate for poorly designed materials.

Over forty years ago, a review of self-paced learning concluded that the evidence on its benefits was inconclusive (Allison, 1975: 5). Nothing has changed since. For some people, in some contexts, for some of the time, self-paced learning may work. Claims that go beyond that cannot be substantiated.

References

Allison, E. 1975. ‘Self-Paced Instruction: A Review’ The Journal of Economic Education 7 / 1: 5 – 12

Altman, H.B. & Politzer, R.L. (eds.) 1971. Individualizing Foreign Language Instruction: Proceedings of the Stanford Conference, May 6 – 8, 1971. Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare

Chastain, K. 1975. ‘An Examination of the Basic Assumptions of “Individualized” Instruction’ The Modern Language Journal 59 / 7: 334 – 344

Disick, R.S. 1975 Individualizing Language Instruction: Strategies and Methods. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Ferster, B. 2014. Teaching Machines. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press

Grittner, F. M. 1975. ‘Individualized Instruction: An Historical Perspective’ The Modern Language Journal 59 / 7: 323 – 333

Hattie, J. 2009. Visible Learning. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Januszewski, A. 2001. Educational Technology: The Development of a Concept. Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited

Kirschner, P. A. & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. 2013. ‘Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education’ Educational Psychologist, 48:3, 169-183

Magill, D. S. 2008. ‘What Part of Self-Paced Don’t You Understand?’ University of Wisconsin 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning Conference Proceedings.

McMahon, M. & Oliver, R. 2001. ‘Promoting self-regulated learning in an on-line environment’ in C. Montgomerie & J. Viteli (eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2001 (pp. 1299-1305). Chesapeake, VA: AACE

Pendleton, C. S. 1930. ‘Personalizing English Teaching’ Peabody Journal of Education 7 / 4: 195 – 200

Saettler, P. 1990. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Denver: Libraries Unlimited

Stern, H.H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Valdman, A. 1968. ‘Programmed Instruction versus Guided Learning in Foreign Language Acquisition’ Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German 1 / 2: 1 – 14