Monday, December 31, 2012

Phase 1 guide--getting the current version

We just discovered that the English Phase 1 resources at http://tinyurl.com/growingparticipators weren't the current ones. Those have been added now. The current ones have 22Sep09 as part of the file name. At least that's the most current we know of!

Sunday, December 30, 2012

The "test" at the end of the Silent Phase


Now we have finished Session 15—end of the Silent Phase. I think we've been increasingly ready to start two-way conversation in recent days. The timing still seems to make pretty good sense for us.

The activities of Session 15 are aimed at refreshing-and-strengthening (what we were still calling "reviewing" when the First 100 Hours was written). For the Session 15 activities, we put out all the toys, objects, pictures, etc. that we can, and involve them.

We often say that in Phase 1, separate "language tests" would be redundant, since the activities themselves are always a test, and labelling them them one doesn't add anything positive and does add something negative in the experience of many people. Were we to view it as a test, I think most people who have reached this point—if they have done what they were supposed to—would get a "high mark" (an "A" or "A-"grade, in American terms).

What is cool about it is the way Session 15 rewards credit, if you want to think of it as that, is that it counts what is in the ZPD, and not just in the "zone of actual development". That is, because during this "test," the nurturer is there interacting with the GP, scaffolding what he is saying visually, linguistically (breaking things down into more comprehensible phrases, for example) and in other ways, for example, by relying on the relatively restricted context of what is on the table. The result is that much beautiful learning is apparent that would be missed in an all-or-none iceberg-unaware kind of language test. And how wrong it would be to be lambasting oneself for what was still rising in the iceberg (as one tends to do in a normal "test") rather than rejoicing over its continued rise

During this "test," some words that have been low in our icebergs since early on suddenly shot way up. We also inaugurated a new "hinting" practice: If either of us couldn't even recognise some word the nurturer used, then the other GP, or the nurturer, could make a circular motion with her or his finger around a section of the table that included the target item and a reasonable amount of other items. When the physical context was narrowed in this way (to something much less than the whole table), we would suddenly realise that the word was familiar after all! The unconscious familiarity of the word became conscious once the context was smaller. I hope that makes sense. You go from thinking, "I don't believe I've ever heard that word," to, "Oh, yeah, I remember hearing that word, and I remember what it means, too."

Another interesting observation in these complex activities (both the utterances and the context were complex) was the shallowness of much of the lexical processing our brains seemed to be doing. This was evident when we misunderstood words by confusing them with others that we can, out of context, quite easily distinguish. For example, lemon is something like nimbuu and tree is something like buutaa. There is no way we would confuse those out of context, but in a long sentence, spoken over a full table, they were confused. Other examples were less dramatic. However, there are pairs of words we have trouble distinguishing (a few) and others that we don't. However, with the increased mental "processing demands" of the activities, we would miss the difference, not just between falling tone and level tone (a subtle difference), but between /i/ and /u/ (a normally clear difference).

Another observation was how that it turned out that Angela had learned better than me in areas that are more important to her than to me—especially noticeable in items of clothing. I wouldn't have thought she was doing anything different from me when we learned those words, but somehow she learned them a lot better, and this involves a notorious area of difference in our general life interests.




Sunday, December 23, 2012

What happened to the "Sociocultural Dimension"?


Someone who is a bit rusty on the GPA, may mistakenly wonder where the Sociocultural Dimension has been in my recent posts. Well you'll recall that Sociocultural Theory is about what learning is and how it happens, and what mental functions are and how they develop.

So all I have been describing is about our nurturer interacting with us in our zone of proximal development (or as we like to say, our growth zone), and playing with us in ways that enable our growth--growth into the practices of his people group.

Then, again, if someone is rusty on all this, she may say say, but where are those host practices in your sessions? Well, the main place they are so far is in the nurturers words and utterances! Although "sociocultural" in "Sociocultural Theory" doesn't mean "anthropological," in the GPAwe also include "culture" in the anthropological sense when we say "sociocultural". We're not falling down on that front either. People say, "But you're not doing cultural observations. You're not asking the nurturer cultural questions. You're just leaving out culture." The opposite could not be truer. Words (and word combinations) are some of the most important cultural artifacts and tools that a people group has inherited and been socialised into! To say, "It's not culture; it's words," is to misunderstand "culture" and "words," the way we see things. Have you ever been in a place where you knew not a word of the local language and tried to get around and meet your needs? If you're like us, you may have felt profoundly powerless in such situations. Once, however, you knew a few dozen crucial words, you were already remarkably empowered! My, are those little chunks of sound ever powerhouses! And soon, they will enable us to discover the host world through conversing with host people, which is the only way the host world can truly be discovered.

Another aspect of "sociocultural" for us is our interpersonal relationships with host people and our involvement in the host community and the process of negotiating an identity--becoming somebody whom host people experience as a particular person they know. Well, we really have connected with our nurturer, but most of it doesn't count, because it in not his world. Our connecting is in one of his worlds, in fact, and one of ours, though far more his than hours. He lives with roommates from various people groups, and so much of his life is now in Urdu, as is much of his life with us. However, during much of the first twenty-some hours of supercharged participation activities we had done, he has indeed been relating to us in his world as he talks to us, and in so doing, manipulates our bodily actions. As for our involvement in the host community, we meet with our nurturer about ten hours a week. So we are in the host community for those ten hours a week, and that relationship is coming along fine, given that it has only been twenty-something hours. That's our community so far. It's as real as if there were dozens of people in it. It can't be much more than it is now anyway, as we don't have enough communication ability to go out and mix, and besides that, more of the people we encounter on the street are not Potwari than are Potwari. Finally, as for our host identity, it will especially spring into life soon, as we start talking in session 15.

Now the rusty have been reminded what "sociocultural" means in the GPA. It's all sociocultural all the way, and it is all cognitive all the way. Two dimensional green jello, changing steadily, socioculturally and cognitively, over time.



Friday, December 21, 2012

Musings around Session 12


WHAT IF I DIDN'T KNOW WHY I'M DOING THESE THINGS?
I keep imagining what it would be like to be doing the first 100 hours without my being I. I can see how some people who have never done such things might be puzzled. Where this is all leading? And why am I learning all these animal names? Or body parts? For such people, more commentary would be helpful. For others, though, there is too much commentary already.

Some, like me, find it exciting to be understanding such long and complex utterances. Others are thinking, "But I don't want to know how to say, 'Kill the spider with the book,' and even if I did want to say that, I wouldn't be able to recall it anyway." How to help everyone to be excited about where killing things with other things is taking them, and about how quickly it is taking them there?

PHONETIC LEARNING
I wrote before about things "coming clear". More and more most I hear is clear right off. Some real phonetic learning must be behind the increasing ease with which I hear and remember.

Speaking of phonetic learning, as we're in Session 12, we've started some sound discrimination activities. One pair of highly similar words was "braid" and "corner". I fairly quickly zeroed in on the difference. Angela couldn't hear it, though she said the difference seemed to be in the final consonant. Good. I said that the tongue body is withdrawn for retroflex consonants, and forward for dental ones, which was also changing the quality of the high back rounded vowel in the syllable, from more close to open. That was all it took. As soon as I said that, she could discriminate between the two words with few or no errors. We've alway said knowing some phonetics is useful. Fortunately, I am able to explain such an issue to most people, just not quite so compactly (well, what I actually said was a tad less technical than what I just wrote).

MORE STRUCTURED INPUT
We're also doing structured input using picture selection to highlight person/number/gender marking on verbs: "In which picture am I running? In which picture are you running?" By omitting the independent pronouns (the "I" and the "you" etc.) we force ourselves to rely on agreement marking to choose the correct picture. What is amazing to me is how that even when we limit the choice to two forms, and those forms are substantially different, nevertheless learning to hear the difference and tie it to the correct picture can be enormously difficult for some people. Inflectional morphology wasn't meant to be acquired easily! That puzzle led to my dissertation research.

Friday, December 14, 2012

More on nurturer training.

Today, while doing Session 8 of the First 100 hours, we introduced our nurturer to the concept of "nurturing" itself. We told him that that is what his role is called. We pointed out to him that as he nurtures us, we are training him in the skill of nurturing, and that we'll keep doing that so that he'll become more skilled. He does often enough participate in decisions about what we will do and how, but he also accepts us as being primarily in charge. The fact that he is in his early twenties and we in our mid-sixties (and he knows I have a Ph.D. related to language learning) may make it easier to gain cooperation in this case than in other cases in the same country, where an experienced elderly teacher may have been recruited to nurture a young foreigner. Today we had almost no metalinguistic discussion, but stuck to the activities. Great progress in nurturer development!

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Things "coming clear"

A few hours into Potwari growing participation, Angela commented to me that a lot was "starting to come clear". If you have done the First 100 Hours, can you identify with this experience of things "coming clear"? That is, initially the speech you hear, even simple utterances such as, "This is a man," is blurry, murky, dismal. Cognitively, it starts "coming clear" at various levels, especially the auditory and lexical levels after a few hours. There is the blurry, murky, dismal, fast and furious flood of words and in some cases you feel like you are aware that you haven't heard many details of a word--just a couple of details that let you recognise it, and in other cases, you feel like you heard a word completely. In both types of cases, at a later point (in the Phase 1, it is a matter of ours) hear one of those same words with what is subjectively crystal clarity, and what you hear includes segments and syllables that you missed altogether before.

We've been citing a a fascinating article in recent training events:

Rivera-Gaxiolam M. , Csibra, G.,  Johnson, M.H. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2000). Electrophysiological correlates of cross-linguistic speech perception in native English speakers. Behavioural Brain Research, 111, pp. 13-23

Revier-Gaxiolam et al. found good evidence that the human brain is hearing phonetic distinctions that, try as he or she may, the brain's owner can't consciously ("awarely") hear. I have had the experience of a sound distinction suddenly jumping out at me after months (with an Urdu distinction) or years (with a Blackfoot distinction). Influenced by Revier-Gaxiolam et al., I now think that my brain may have been hearing the phonetic distinctions over and over and over, instance after instance after instance. When the distinction finally jumped out at me, it wasn't because there had been a quantum leap from not hearing at all to hearing clearly. The quantum leap was only in my consciousness-- not in my low-level perception. Learning accumulated at the low perceptual level which reached a certain threshold and then popped into my consciouness.

So be encouraged, that when all appears to be blurry, murky, dismal, a lot of clear detail may be registering in your brain that you aren't aware of, and after enough experience has accumulated, the clarity may pop into your consciousness.

Similar principles may be behind the way whole words suddenly "come clear," later then specific inflected word forms "come clear". When I think of my youthful efforts at word learning, relying on 1,000 English-Blackfoot flash cards, I recognise there was a disconnect between what happened in my actual experience of hearing speech--the blurry-murky-dismal to suddently-clear pattern--on the one hand, and my metacognitive "word learning" strategy with the flash cards, which always involved detailed conscious awareness of the word (in its orthographic representation).

I think one reason some people experience anxiety in the early hours of Phase 1 (First 100 hours) is that they are aiming at the familiar metacognitive experience of "word learning", not expecting accumulated experience of what seems blurry-murky-dismal to form the natural path to experiences of suddenly-popping-into-clarity. Angela's reference to things "coming clear" might provide a helpful new bit of jargon to use in encouraging growing participtors in Phase 1 to recognise and value the pattern of learning that they are experiencing.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

A Phase 1 nurturer needs to be smart

As we continue training our nurturer, it is great to see him go ahead of us, for example, in setting up a little bit of "structured input" without our asking for it, or even thinking of it. Today, he grouped dolls, (depicting boys and girls of a nuclear family we had set up) into singles and groups so that he could get us to hear the difference between singular and plural direct object marking. And he's only been with us for about ten hours. The bad news is that such a person, with such intelligence and initiative, is always wanting to enlighten us with lots of analytical, metalinguistic and meta-cultural explanations. The good news is that he can grasp the difference between informing us and playing with us. (The puppets helped with this.) So as we were doing "patting" and "stroking" and "touching" today, our nurturer was wanting to talk about "encouraging" (as the meaning of patting), "an old person showing love to a young person" (for as the meaning of stroking--specifically on the head) and "getting someone's attention" (as the meaning of touching someone). In Phase 2 and beyond, that will be great. In fact, we might find a way to work such ideas into later Phase 1. Right now we're just ten hours into things, and wanting our brains to be forced to parse sentences with direct objects, in the context of supercharged playing.

So the nurturer needs to understand the Time Dimension (we're still babies, not adults, and the time will come for such game-external understandings of patting, stroking and touching, etc.), the Sociocultural Dimension (the frame is that of a _game_, socioculturally, not a lecture in which we need to be told in detail what happens in life outside of the game) and the Cognitive Dimension (though we don't talk about the grammar, he needs to appreciate in some vague way the fact that we just want to parse a lot of speech of a particular form, and have fun doing it, in order to see how people express direct objects with different combinations of person and number, so that soon we can do that ourselves). So while we do still lose a lot of time during a supercharged participation session to efforts at metalinguistic and meta-cultural information sharing, we nevertheless feel that we'll soon have a nurturer who can stick to the game we're playing, see the point of it in terms of our current growth zone, and see the point of it in that we're learning to understand how particular basic ideas are expressed through particular forms. So yes, another quality of a good Phase 1 nurturer is a bit of extra brightness. The good news is that in every people group many such people are to be found. The bad news is that they are in demand for other purposes as well.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Training nurturers

Another frequent question, in addition to that of finding nurturers, is the question of training them. If you're a GPA-trained language learning advisor, then you have been through a ten-hour Phase 1 experience in which we tried to get everything to happen "perfectly" from the first moments of Session 1:

 MARKS OF A PERFECT NURTURER IN PHASE 1, SESSION 1
***Starts with two items.
***Brings in only one new one at time.
 ***Introduces them in a full sentence in the host language, such as "This is a man," rather than just saying "man" or saying "This is" in English (or other bridge language" and "a man" in the host language. With Lexicarry items, frequently asks, "Who is saying..." (e.g., "Who is saying, 'Hello'?" rather than just "Hello".)
***Gets the GPs to point by asking them in complete questions ("Where is the man?" or "Which is the man?" etc.)
***Good at randomizing and asking in ways that are unpredictable, while not forgetting to include earlier items.
***Asks about the newest item more often than earlier items.
***Has good sense of when to add the next item, based on GPs responses
***Notices when a GP is confused about an item or two (or just can't remember an item) and focuses on those for a bit
***In introducing items in the first activity, intermingles the introduction of "nouns" (man, woman, boy, girl) and "pronouns" (typically, "emphatic pronouns" as linguists would say--independent words meaning I, you, he, we, you plural, they, etc.) In other words, after item 5 of the set (man, woman, I, you, boy...) has been introduced, the nurturer might be asking, "Where is the woman? Where are you? Where am I? Where is the boy? Where is the woman? Where is the man? Where is the boy? Where are you?..."
 ***If a GP mistakenly points to the woman when asked "Where is the man?" the nurturer responds naturally in the host language saying something like ,"No. That isn't the man. That is the woman. Where is the man?" 
***The nurturer also throws in host language comments like "Good. Right. Etc."
***And once things are well under way, the nurturer naturally alternates between full sentence, "Where is the man? Where is the woman? etc." and isolated words "man, woman, etc." of course, pausing for GPs to point.
***Through all of this the nurturer never says a word in English (or other bridges language). This means s/he doesn't try to explain the language or culture to you in English (etc.) rather than pushing on with you in your growth zone.
***The nurturer is always clearly interacting with the GPs, communicating with them, caring for them, and not "teaching them words".

Now the nurturer who displays all these marks is a well-trained, no doubt naturally gifted nurturer. As Angela and I started Phase 1, Session 1 with three different people recently, we saw again that training them to proceed as just described is a slow process and they will improve over many hours as we keep reminding them. At the outset we fully explain all that we want them to do, and then as they repeatedly don't do what we asked them to, we remind them occasionally, but only occasionally. Our current nurturer is now proceeding increasingly as described under "MARKS OF A PERFECT NURTURER IN PHASE 1, SESSION 1" above, but is still far from perfect. So we overlook most of what he doesn't do, and occasionally remind him of a point he is not following, and he apologizes, and keeps getting better. By the time we've done the First 100 hours with him, and perhaps coached through the first, say, ten hours with another GP or group of GPs, he'll hopefully have all those MARKS OF A PERFECT NURTURER IN PHASE 1, SESSION 1.

 We find that we can get people to do what we need (in various languacultures) without providing a lot of theoretical reasoning. They do what we ask. They see that it works. For them, that means they've got the point. I think if the people we trained with were certified language teachers, we might need to give a lot more of the theory. However, we find the metaphor of "big brother/sister to me as I struggle to understand you or talk with you" is pretty effective. Also it helps to explain the fact that they are not "teaching" us, but rather "playing with us" in ways that help us learn (better, grow). "Play" is a key concept in the GPA. We need to emphasize it more.

 So in the end, training nurturers doesn't seem all that complicated to me, if I know what they are supposed to do, and care to train them rather than just let them do what comes naturally. Phase 1 is the most challenging phase in this regard. Phase 2 is far more intuitive conversational interaction. Nurturers easily see the point of things like massaging, expanding, vocabulary recordings, etc. They often don't get the point of "retelling" by the GP: that the GP is to talk at his or her current developmental level, using "his/her own words". When nurturers feel they are a teacher at that point, they will typically want the GPs to sound like natives, even in Phase 2 and 3, i.e., to use rote memorization, rather than actual speech production processes! So again, the "big brother/sister" metaphor is a help. "I'll struggle to talk in my own words, and you help me to do it a little better."

Having admitted that training takes time and patience (on everyone's part), we still forewarn you that the next time you are a Phase 1 coach in one of our training events, you'll find us speaking to you when you don't get your nurture to follow the MARKS OF A PERFECT NURTURER, even in PHASE 1, SESSION 1.
 We want you to know what it is supposed to look like, but then as you train nurturers, we want you to realize that it will take awhile to come to look like that.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Finding a nurturer

We recently moved from Kazakhstan to Pakistan. We'd been away from Kazakhstan for over a year, and went there for just three weeks to dispose of our stuff, and prepare a shipment for Pakistan. So during those brief three weeks in Kazakhstan, we did ten hours of supercharged participation in our Kazakh life even though we were leaving Kazakhstan, because we're not in Phase 6 yet in Kazakh,and the GPA holds that growing participation lasts to the end of one's sojourn in a particular languacultural world, and if you're not in Phase 6, and the end hasn't transpired, then you do supercharged participation activities!

 Next we found ourselves in Pakistan. Much of the speech we heard around us was not Urdu (though we hear plenty of Urdu, too). We at first assumed it was Punjabi we were hearing (it turns out it was four or five languages), and we thought we would become GPs in a Punjabi world. However, we were then told that the local indigenous language is Potwari, which is relatively closely related to Punjabi, but not mutually intelligible. So Potwari is our new world. (The Punjabis are relative newcomers to this area.)

 A Punjabi friend said he could find us a Potwari nurturer. He brought one, or so we thought. They guy seemed less than confident about the things he was saying to us in Phase 1, Session 1. The next day at the scheduled time, our Punjabi friend showed up with someone else. The first guy didn't feel like coming! So much for the first guy. (He has been back on a purely social visit.) This second guy had great difficulty with Phase 1, Session 1. He couldn't say, "This is a man," and he told us there is no word in Potwari that means "we". So we explored a little more deeply, and it turned out the guy wasn't Potwari at all, but Punjabi. So that led us to enquire about the first guy. Our Punjabi friend checked into it, and the first guy was Punjabi as well.

Then that same Punjabi friend said he found a true Potwari, but the guy was asking what seemed like an outlandish amount per hour. Deciding on the amount to pay was in fact a problem. We checked with a language school, and chose their beginning-teacher hourly wage as what we would offer potential nurturers. Judging by people's reactions, I felt it must be a bit low, and so I checked with another language school, and their beginning-teacher hourly wage was double that of the first school. The amount was still reasonable for us, and seemed to make more sense to local people.

But we still needed to find someone. We started going through the shops and asking people "What is your mother tongue?" We had another false lead, as a Hazaraval guy came and offered his services (their language is called Hindko). It's as though people can't see why the specific language should matter that much! Soon three people had said they would look around for us, and one said he'd come himself. He was a taxi driver. He came, but found Phase 1, Session 1 too demanding "mentally", and said he just couldn't do it along with his taxi driving.

A couple days later, the taxi driver returned with a young student in tow who is Potwari and wanted to do the job. It turns out he is very capable and motivated, although his variety of Potwari is quite far removed from our locality. We decided to do the first 100 hours and some of Phase 2 with him, if we can, and then go on in Phase 2 with local people, and start learning all the adjustments we need to make. After we had settled on this student as our nurturer, someone else showed up, the Hazaraval guy who had come before, with a Potwari friend in tow! Too late. This Potwari is really local, and a close neighbour. We took his name and address for later reference.

 So there you have it. A garden-variety nurturer search, with typical challenges.I make it sound not too hard, but in fact, I suffer from severe nurturer search anxiety, and can get rather depressed during the process. Hope it's really over for now!

Friday, December 7, 2012

Getting back into the "First 100 Hours"

The "First 100 Hours" guide to Phase 1 began in early 2001 in Kazakhstan. I would get up two or three hours before my wife and son, and plan a two-hour session, and gather all of the resources required by the plan. Then the two of them would get up and Galia, a sweet Kazakh woman, would arrive. For two hours we would attempt to follow my plan.

Then Galia would leave, Angela would head to the kitchen and put her apron on, while Chad would plunge into his home school work. I would go back to my clamshell Mac laptop, where the original plan had been saved in a file, and I would now edit that file so that it was no longer the envisioned session, but the actual session that we managed to accomplish in two hours with Galia. So at the end of eighty hours with Galia, we had a complete plan, which was in fact a description of just what we had done.

 That was twelve years ago. Since then, the plan has been translate into major languages, and used by hundreds of people in scores of countries and languacultures. This past week, after all that interlude, I find myself using that very plan again personally, for the first time since twelve years ago. Those who know me well might think I'd want to modify or replace it. However it is *so* nice this time to not have to spend two or three hours a day making a plan for a two hour session! Now I can see why so many people are happy to use it as is. It simplifies life.

Angela and I are now growing participators in the Potwari world, a languaculture of Pakistan in the same subgroup of Indo-Aryan languages as Punjabi. In our first six hours, we have done four sessions. That's faster than we went twelve years ago, when we only did one session per two hours. However, there are huge lexical and grammatical similarities of Potwari to Urdu, and so I'm suprised we didn't go farther than session four in six hours.

 Anyway, after hearing feedback from many, many people, doing Phase 1 in normal life, or having a Phase 1 experience in workshops and in my North Dakota course, I'm again experiencing Phase 1 on a full scale. As I'm doing this, I'm always thinking of how people who know nothing about Sociocultural Theory and Psycholinguistics would be experiencing what I am now going through. It should help me to better explain the GPA in the future. The GPA did not exist yet when the "First 100 Hours" plan was created, but some of the explanatory material in the guide developed along with the GPA.

Thursday, December 6, 2012

URLs for other information and resources

If anyone wants a bit of an update to the GPA, see http://tinyurl.com/GPApproach. If you just want resources for the GPA and Six-Phase Programme, go straight to http://tinyurl.com/growingparticipation.   For Phase 1, you'll now find the guide in English, Russian, Kazakh, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. There are versions around in some other languages that haven't been available to me. The point of having it in other languages is not necessarily to learn those languages, but for people who know those language to learn yet other languages (or to help others to do so).