The Practical Linguist / Sustaining intense language learning
Marshall R. Childs / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
Conventional wisdom among marathon runners is that each runner gets just a few years of peak performance. During this period, the runner makes progress to ever-higher levels of ability. In the runner's mind, it is a sustained and exhilarating experience. The wisdom allows that the peak performance can be taken at any age. My own peak was between ages 38 and 41, when I improved from lower mediocre to upper mediocre, decreasing my marathon time by 50 minutes and devoting most of my waking energy to the process. For a brief, exciting time, although never a winner, I was a fierce age-group competitor in road and trail races around New York.
Some runners, blessed with native talent, improve from good to world best. Japanese marathon runner Naoko Takahashi's streak began with the Nagoya International Women's marathon in March 1998, continued to a spectacular win in the December 1998 Asian Games, featured a gold in the 2000 Olympics and culminated in the world record in Berlin in December 2001, in which she became the first woman to finish in under 2 hours and 20 minutes. This streak of improvement occupied Takahashi for 3-1/2 years from age 25 to age 29, and shows a string of peak performance at the very highest level.
Examples of sustained peak performances are found in intellectual fields as well as athletic ones. Physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) changed the way we see the universe. In his "miracle year" of 1905, Einstein wrote a series of papers proposing completely new concepts including the quantum theory of light and the theory of relativity, featuring the famous equation e=mc2.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) wrote about the feelings that accompany peak performances. His concept of self-actualizing includes the individual's ability to participate in activities, to improve performances, and to enjoy the process without depending on external rewards. During sustained periods of peak performance, people tend to be self-directed; they rely on their own feelings and perceptions to guide them.
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Sustaining peak learning
Periods of peak performance can apply to language learning. Successful language learners often report that there was a period of hard work in which they were highly motivated and during which they enjoyed significant progress.
Improving on the simplistic notion of "affective filter," John H. Schumann of the University of California in Los Angeles studied what he called "stimulus appraisal." In his 1997 book, The Neurobiology of Affect in Language, Schumann wrote that stimulus appraisal in the brain is not just liking or disliking something, but is instead a detailed check of "novelty, pleasantness, goal/need significance, coping mechanisms, and self and social image."
Schumann's practical recommendation is that we encourage language students to enjoy a period of "sustained deep learning" (SDL), which must continue for several years in order to learn a language. He defined SDL as a self-supporting cycle including stimulus appraisal, cognitive activity toward the stimulus, evaluation of success, causal attribution, and emotion.
Two factors seem important in shifting gears into SDL. one is taking personal control of what and how you learn. The other is knowing precisely how you are progressing.
Taking personal control is something that most of our students do not do, and perhaps do not imagine. We need to help them understand what lies within their power and set them on a course of taking independent responsibility. Others have written of this process, and I once devoted a column to it ("Students, learn English by taking control," The Practical Linguist, Aug. 28, 2000).
The second important factor in SDL is the ability to measure progress frequently. Measurements in terms of numbers are best, but accurate numbers are hard to find in language learning. People who are on diets, or people who run several 10-kilometer races every year, are in a good position to have numerical measures of their progress. For language learners, it is not so obvious how to measure short-term progress, and little is written about it.
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Measuring short-term progress
Studying a language is like hiking through a desert: Everything is difficult, everything looks like everything else and there is no natural sense of getting closer to the goal. Not having a sense of progress is a relatively neglected problem in most of our language learning programs. The often-reported demotivation of language learners in schools may be due in part to their inability to know their progress toward speaking the language.
In an ideal world, we would offer students periodic measures of their progress as accurate as kilometer markers on a railroad. In actual practice, we are not able to do that. Tests of global ability like the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) are not accurate enough to measure one-semester gains. What, then, can we do? Let me suggest some practical measures that might help to gauge progress over months rather than years.
The general goal is for students frequently to gauge their progress toward using the language effectively. Both subjective and objective measures are possible.
There are several subjective ways of noting progress by having students write their own records of what they are thinking and doing. Perhaps the easiest way (for teachers) is to ask students to spend the last three to five minutes of every class hour writing in a diary what things they have noticed and done that day. The cumulative record allows students to look back and reflect that they have actually learned quite a large number of things.
A more elaborate subjective record is created by having students assemble portfolios--usually including tests and written work, but also diagrams, photos, letters, e-mails and miscellaneous things that do not belong anywhere else but are too good to throw away. For students, reviewing portfolios is a sure way of recognizing their personal progress.
Objective measures include all things that are quantifiable and repeatable. Unfortunately, I know of no measures of overall language ability that can reflect the slow and steady progress within, say, one semester. But we can measure aspects of language ability.
In one of my classes, an activity is to read 400-word passages from a 1989 book by Edward Spargo, Timed Readings. Students answer questions, and note the reading time and number of correct answers. Over the course of a semester, they can see their reading speed improve and perhaps also their scores for comprehension.
In classes in which students are doing extensive reading, it is natural to keep track of the number of pages read and, if the books are graded readers, the number of pages by vocabulary level. This is not a direct measure of learning progress, but students sense a degree of success in the number of pages read.
Another objective measure is the number of words (or bytes, or lines) of texts sent and received by e-mail. Using their computers, students can measure the volume of communications they generate and receive, month by month. An effective measure is the volume of personal messages received. To get someone to send you a personal e-mail, you have to create a certain level of interest in him or her--so this is a measure of effective personal communication.
Baseball player Masumi Kuwata, a 20-year veteran in Japan, last month signed a contract to join the Pittsburgh Pirates team in the United States. He told reporters he is newly interested in English: "Since I had to negotiate without an agent, I've been studying English. Now [it's] one of my hobbies." At age 38, Kuwata has begun sustained deep learning of English. We can hold him up as an example to many of our students.
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Send e-mail to childs@tuj.ac.jp. The column will return on Feb. 16.
(Jan. 19, 2007)