Systematic Acquisition

Right now I'm working on something I call Systematic Acquisition. The focus is vocabulary and grammar.

Vocabulary

On the vocabulary front, I'm doing two things.

First, I'm compiling a wordlist (currently 27746 words) from various sources such as the the Dolch Sight Word List, the General Service List, the Academic Word List and the Collins COBUILD Learner's Dictionary. It's all going into an Excel file called Multilist. Multilist includes information about presence in a list, frequency in a corpus, type of entry in a source, inflections and alternate spellings. All this information will be used to construct a systematic list which I will use to create vocabulary learning materials.

Second, I'm refining a vocabulary teaching technique which combines Language Item Management (LIM) and Discourse Loading (DL).

Language Item Management empowers the learner to rapidly assess his or her own knowledge of various language items (including vocabulary and grammar) and to make decisions about which items should be learned to which degree. It begins with a five-item (Lykert) scale called the NUMPY Scale (No-Unlikely-Maybe-Probably-Yes). Learners grade each item in a list (for example, the target words in a reading passage) according to their answers to the question: Would I recognize and understand this item if I saw it in a sentence? The instructor verifies the assessments by asking for definitions or examples. Faulty definitions are corrected and unfamiliar words are explained. In the full form of LIM, the NUMPY Scale is applied to five Acquisition Fields and objectives for all items are set based on an agreed assessment of how well each item should be learned. Each acquisition field is a box which combines two parameters: Production-Reception and Competence-Competition. Production is active use of an item in speech and writing. Reception is passive use of an item in listening and reading. Competence is current and constant facility with the item. Competition is opportunistic facility in response to an ephemeral situation such as a language test, an interview or a presentation. An item may be assessed as productive-competent, productive-competitive, receptive-competent, receptive-competitive or null (neither competent nor competitive in either production or reception). On the NUMPY Scale, Y corresponds to productive competence, P corresponds to receptive competence, M corresponds to productive competition, U corresponds to receptive competition and N corresponds to null. Items may be bumped up or bumped down as learner and instructor agree based on learner needs.

Discourse Loading is the practice of generating "teaching sentences". A teaching sentence is an individual sentence or set of sentences that contains sufficient contextual information to make the meaning of its target item unmistakable. Imagine the blank in a cloze item without an accompanying list of previously distinguished vocabulary. To draw the learner's mind to a particular word out of the thousands the learner may have acquired, the sentence must contain an abnormally large amount of distinguishing information. For the word ant, a sentence like "There was an ____ in my sandwich" would be woefully inadequate if the environmental context of the sentence provided no clues. Ignoring the phonemic clue of "an", the target could be any noun whose real-world counterpart was small enough to fit in a sandwich, anything from a bacterium to a pickle to a small mouse to a cigarette butt. If we add sufficient context to the sentence (or set of sentences itself), the possibilities become limited to one word or one set of words which share one meaning--and meaning is the desired element in a discourse loaded sentence. "There was an _____ in my sandwich. It must have crawled in there when I set the sandwich down on the blanket at the picnic. There were thousands of the little black insects hunting in the grass for food to take back to their colony" tunes the choices down to pretty well one. Crawl, blanket, picnic, thousands, little, black, insects, hunt, grass, food, take back and colony all work together to restrict the potential meaning of the omitted item.

The advantages of Discourse Loading are at least four. First, in order to imagine the context necessary to limiting the possible meanings of the target item, the learner must concentrate very keenly on the target item's meaning, creating a tighter association between meaning and form. Second, in order to build the required context, the learner must recycle previously learned vocabulary, thus refreshing or reactivating the selected vocabulary. Third, having generated the context-laden sentence, the learner has an example for future reference. Fourth, the example makes the meaning of the target item so unmistakably clear that even ten, twenty or thirty years later, the item will be instantly reactivated if the learner happens upon the sentence in notebook or memory.

Grammar

On the grammar front, I am developing an approach to teaching grammar called Behavioural Grammar. The impetus for this project arose from the realization that a Grammar Gap exists between those who are able and those who are unable to translate the conceptual grammars taught in most language courses into behavioural grammars. Grammar is traditionally taught as a concept to be mysteriously transmuted in the learner's mind from a set of ideas to a set of procedures. Communicative and interactional grammar teaching seek to facilitate the process of translation by making grammar immediate and urgent; however, translation of concept to procedure is still left to the learner. Just as some but not all would-be musicians take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to musical procedures, with or without conceptual training, so some but not all would-be language learners take rapidly and apparently effortlessly to linguistic procedures. Rapid and apparently effortless acquisition of any procedure stems from what I call operance, or a natural tendency or inclination to emit behaviours that naturally lead to acquisition of a procedure. A learner who is operant in regard to a particular subject will seem to learn it rapidly and effortlessly, while learners who are respondant or, worse, resistant, to the subject will either struggle or rebel. One advantage of teaching behavioural grammar is that the non-operant learner is not required to translate concepts to behaviours.

The relationship of operance to respondance can be clarified by analogy to genius and ordinary intelligence. The formula for calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is annually acquired and applied by millions if not billions of ordinary adolescent minds the world over. Yet never in a million or billion years would even the average engineer have come up with that formula on his or her own. It takes a genius like Pythagorus to discover or invent such a thing, but any normal mind can comprehend and commandeer it. Even the formulations of later luminaries like Newton and Einstein are perfectly accessible to ordinary minds. How is this so? It is so because each genius translated his conceptual insight into a procedural formula and nearly anyone can grasp and make use of a formula. In principle, anything can be taught to anyone if it is taught as a behaviour and all useful concepts are eventually translated into behaviours. In terms of achievement, the ordinary learner is equivalent to the genius if he or she is able to acquire and apply the genius's insight. The only difference is that the genius acquired the insight and developed the procedure operantly, by virtue of his or her own natural tendencies, while the ordinary learner acquired the procedure respondantly, that is, in response to instruction aimed at instilling the insight and conditioning the behaviour.

At present, I am working on verb inflection. I have distilled a formula for consistent correct inflection of English verbs and am developing activities for conditioning this behaviour in all of my students, from those in individual classes to those in large group classes. Preliminary results are encouraging and I am swiflty refining both approach and technique.

Differential Acquisition Theory

Concerned about helping my students really achieve real native-like fluency in vocabulary and grammar, I have been striving to understand how first (L1) and second (L2) languages are learned and acquired by people of various ages. From all this cogitation, based on experience as a learner/acquirer of an L1 (English) and four L2s (French, Haitian Creole, Russian and Mandarin), on observations as an ESL instructor in Ukraine and Taiwan, and on reading in language acquisition theory and learning theory, has emerged a theory I call Differential Acquisition. In brief, it recognizes that human beings go through three stages of development when it comes to language learning: innate, instinctive and intellectual.

The Innate Stage

The innate stage may also be termed the neural stage, because all language activity at this stage is essentially neural. The idiolinguoverse (individual language universe) is "hooking up" with its instruments of reception and production, the auditory and vocal tracts. This corresponds by analogy to the early development of the universe as a growing collection of elements under high energies. This elemental stage is characterized by high activity and low organization. All activity at this stage is random, the elements behaving according to their properties and under no other control than their inherent nature. It is the stage of speciation, at which the individual acquires the the characterisitics of its species, including a characteristic set of faculties, among which is the language faculty (whether or not this faculty is separate from a general learning faculty).

The Instinctive Stage

The instinctive stage may also be termed the social stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly social. The idiolinguoverse has come into contact with the sociolinguoverse (group language universe) and is chiefly concerned with copying it. This corresponds by analogy to the development of life on earth with a focus on survival. This biological stage is characterized by continuing high activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of genius for most individuals, the stage at which activity and organization are both high, resulting in frequent environmentally responsive reorganization. Early activity is random, but becomes increasingly subject to a developing instinct, an instinct focused on survival within the group and therefore on becoming recognizably of the group, that is, acquiring the culture and so, by inclusion, acquiring the language of the group to a degree that marks the individual as belonging to the group.

The Intellectual Stage

The intellectual stage may also be termed the individual stage, because language activity at this stage becomes increasingly achievement-oriented. The idiolinguoverse focuses now on its own ends, which often do not entirely coincide with those of the group, usually as a complex, but occasionally as separate objectives. This corresponds by analogy to the development of technology in human culture. This technological stage is charaterized by decreasing activity and increasing organization. It is the stage of lost genius for most inidividuals. The tension between activity and organization has settled in favour of organization and reorganization becomes increasingly difficult. Activity at this stage is mainly deliberate or intellectual. The individual already belongs to a group and is seldom sufficiently motivated to fully acculturate with another group. Lingustic interaction with other groups focuses on specific material ends rather than general acceptance.

Efficiency

The overriding principle of lanuage acquisition is efficiency. Each stage is naturally tuned to maximize efficiency in handling its material. Newborns essentially ignore the sociolinguoverse because they must first develop the idiolinguoversal equipment to perceive, interpret and respond to it. Very young children indiscriminately absorb the characteristics of groups to which they feel they must belong because belonging increases the chances of being cared for and protected and therefore of surviving at a time when the individual is incapable of surviving without a great deal of tending. Teenagers and adults (and younger children not exposed to language under survival conditions) aquire only those elements of new sociolinguoverses they find necessary to achieving their ends (which may range from very basic interaction through various levels of communication to conscientious artistic performance).

A Cure for Efficiency

Systematic Acquisition provides a means to access or at least mimic the dormant instinctive stage. When language items are taught as behaviours and accurate behaviour is crucial to success, intellectual learners revert, at least partially, to a survival-oriented acculturation approach. Of course, the elements of the target culture to be acquired and the degree to which they must be acquired come under the control of the instructor, whose artificial culture, one which demands greater instinctive accuracy than does the natural intellectual culture of the real language world, will push the learner's achievement closer to the native standard than the non-operant learner could manage by simple immersion.

While the latest version of my wordlist uploads, I'll pop into this cooliris window and post a blog entry for the first time in six months or so.

It's been a fine time for me. Just got back a week ago from three weeks in Victoria (brother) and Prince George (parents). One of the big highlights was a two-hour canoe trip with my old friend Brock and my five-year-old son, Ben. Ben's a natural. With a little coaching and observation, he was dipping and feathering like a pro. Unfortunately, here in Kaohsiung, we won't get many opportunities to glide on lakes.

One little event that will have repercussions for the next several months at least is my invention of behavioural grammar. I had been reading Skinner's The Technology of Teaching and was just starting Chomsky's The Minimalist Program when it hit me that grammar-in-use is behavioural, not conceptual, and that I could develop a behavioural grammar that would guarantee consistently, continuously correct performance. I got on it right away and wound up with a good start on a behavioural grammar for verb inflection.

These days, though, I'm back to slogging it out over Multilist. I still have half a dozen sources to input, but yesterday I decided I had enough to start an acquisitional wordlist. Basically, I'm paring the list down to useful items, grouping the items by useable base form and splitting the result into two lists: the first containing the base forms and the second containing so-called derivations. The idea is to teach the base forms as a resource for extrapolative reading, add the derivations as fodder for extrapolation, and leave students with a solid intermediate vocabulary and trusty vocabulary building skills. Naturally, I'll eventually put together a complete basic-through-advanced list, but it will take time. I'm hoping to have the current project done by Saturday so I can test it on a new TOEFL student.

Missing in action might have been a more appropriate title, but most of what I've been doing away from the blogosphere is leading, I hope, to a well-earned academic title, among other things (fame and fortune, to name but two of the least).

Phased Acquisition Theory has turned out to be but a drop in the bucket of Differential Aquisition Theory, my current unified theory of language acquisition, inspired by reading in cosmology, evolution and computer programming and bolstered by reading in theories of language acquisition and theories of learning. Naturally, working out the theory, its hypotheses and potential research topics has taken a lot of my time.

Even more time-consuming has been the seminal phase of LIDbIT (Language Item Database of Integrated Tables), Multilist (Multiple Source Wordlist), a composite of wordlists from something like a dozen online and print sources. Got to View/Wordlists to take a boo.

I've also been developing this site, one of a complex of spajes, or student, professional and academic journals. The platform is Drupal and one of the kicks is setting up various content types to cover the range of contributions users might someday make. Another challenge is figuring out how to collect all of a single user's contributions to one view for feeding to other sites. At the moment I have My Blog and Subsites, but the blog module is not configurable and the Mysite module does not access user-generated content types. As far as I can tell, user-specific views are not yet creatable.

CTV and CBC have reported over the last couple of days on a piece of research involving babies watching videos of people speaking English and French. The study revealed that the children attended to the facial movements of speakers of the two languages in a manner similar to that in which they attended to the speech sounds of speakers of the two languages. Briefly, children in the process of acquiring language tend to attend more intently to sounds which differ from those they have already dealt with. This is considered an essential strategy in childhood language acquisition. The conclusion drawn by both news outlets is that small children can distinguish between English and French just by watching people's faces.

Although it makes perfect sense to me that children in what I'll call accelerated acquisition mode would be sensitive and attentive to differences in sound and sight, whether linguistic or otherwise, I do not think we are justified in assuming that the subjects of the experiment in question perceived facial movements as linguistic acts. As children learn to articulate the phonetic elements of languages, they most likely do pay attention to movements of lips and tongue. Mine, who happen to be bilingual Mandarin and English speakers, do, particularly when attacking their father tongue (English), to which they experience much less exposure. However, linguistically motivated attention to movements of lips and tongue is generally accompanied by attention to sound. In other words, it is quite possible, probably most likely, that the children in the experiment were responding to the facial movements in the videos as visual stimuli, not as speech acts and not as models of phonetic articulation.

I do not doubt that children combine attention to facial movement and attention to speech sounds as they acquire the phonetic inventory of languages they plan to acquire. Even adults do that. My objection is to the assumption that children interpret differences or sets of differences in facial movements as differences between languages.

I'd like to read the paper itself, but will have to wait, not doubt, some time for the electronic version to become available.

Other Sources

Yahoo! Canada News

Globe and Mail

University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre: Visual Language Discrimination in Infancy

It's not fashionable to include the Almighty or any variation thereof in discussions of scientific inquiry, unless, of course, like Steven Weinberg, you're using a discussion of scientific inquiry as a platform to propound your own atheism. Frankly, I don't care a pig's situpon for fashion. You can see that, though subtly, in my attire. I am not loud about my faith and doubt, but neither am I timid. And I'm as happy to enlarge on my acceptance of evolution when confronted at church as I am to assert my devotion to the Maker when challenged in school.

That said, let me get on with my story.

After some excrutiating soul-searching, and both earthly and divine networking, I've come to the conclusion that it was in God's design for me and those I will influence that I take two courses in the master of distance education programme through Athabasca University, fully intending to complete the entire programme, only to run out of money for it for almost two years and inevitably conclude that I need a degree in applied linguistics.

You see, having taken those two courses in distance ed, I've seen my way pretty clearly to achieving the personal goal of building an online language school--and for now that's about all I need from the MDE. When I saw myself as a distance educator, I did all kinds of heavy thinking about the Internet, particularly what I now call logue, the study of online asynchronous communication, and I've come up with some nifty innovations I'll make when I've learned to programme. Once I'd done all that, it was time to get back to my real vocation: scholar of tongues.

I used to think being a scholar of tongues meant studying and teaching languages. I still think it does, but for me the definition now includes studying the learning and acquisition of languages. I've had some nifty ideas in that line, too, of late.

So now I'm in between. I had to suspend the MDE for lack of funds, but my GPA was such that I was given an extra year to get back with the programme, so to speak, and that has meant that although I won't be able to start the MAAL for another nine months, I have the resources and time to get working on the review of the literature and other elements of my thesis on Phased Acquisition Theory.

Now, what do I mean by God's design? I am not one of those who believes that God goes around ordering everything case by case. What I believe about God doesn't affect him at all, of course; I am only explaining my view of matters so that adding my voice to those of the faithful does not add fuel to any fire that I wouldn't want to see burning. I believe in a personal God, a personage, and that we resemble him in some way, although I am not convinced that the resemblence is as complete as we tend to believe. I also believe that our purpose in being on earth is to become as like him as we can in mortality as a litmus test of our ability to become as like him as we can in immortality.

My beliefs are not mystical. Some aspects of God and our relationship to him are a bit beyond our scope at the moment, but I believe that his nature and powers are tied up with the universe, just like ours. I also believe that some of our ideas about him are a little off the mark, and will continue to be, however carefully we correct them, until we reach a point in our ability to perceive and think that allows us to see him as he is.

The main thing here is that God is conscious of us and is willing and able to act in our lives in accordance with our desire for him to act and his notion of the appropriateness of any action he might take. In my case, that means guiding and helping me to accomplish certain assignments. My part occasionally requires charging ahead and sometimes requires standing and waiting. The standing and waiting seems to take up more time, but one thing that fits me for the work I've been given is my inability to sit around twiddling my thumbs. When I'm not sure what I should be doing, that generally means I should be figuring myself out and doing something to make the most of what I find. Such is the case at present.

I have been priviliged over the years to receive very specific and clear guidance about the path I should follow and the deeds I should do. I have also been priviliged to be left to myself for long periods, sometimes in the desert with nothing but sand on all hands, sometimes in an oasis with enough and to spare but always with a sense that the desert is just out there and the next leg of the journey not all that long away.

Titles, abstracts and introductions make interesting reading when you've got a narrow agenda in mind.

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This is a windup for an eventual paper, with references and everything, on Phased Acquisition Theory. Bear in mind that the present document is a blog post with a blog post's rough edges, including unsubstantiated appeals to authority and common sense, and wild swings at better established ideologies.

Initial Development

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Wherever I end up doing my master's degree, I'm going to need a plan, so here's a rough one. Very rough at times. Gliffy captures the most recent version of a diagram for display outside the tool.

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My wife is finally fully behind my pursuing a master's degree in applied linguistics. She's beginning to see how I'm going to need to get out of the hectic commercial cram school market and into an environment that encourages and rewards the background preparation I like to do. To get into that slightly more highbrow market, I need further credentials.

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Okay. 5.1 all set up (I think).