Starting more Intro to GPA stuff over on the Facebook page

I've decided that since this blog is geared to people already familiar with the GPA and with the 6-Phase Programme, I oughta start gearing the Facebook page to newcomers and enquirers. (Of course, there will be space limitations.) I've posted the first of a number of tiny little introductory posts over there, for those who are interested: http://www.facebook.com/GPApproach

Nurturer training: Negotiation of form; realism with pronunciation.

For those interested in nurturer training, today the topic came up of "negotiation of form" (as opposed to "negotiation of meaning"). We do a lot of the negotiation of form as the activities become more complex! The nurturer scaffolds our initial efforts as we attempt to talk, and then when one of us has succeeded in getting our point out, he turns to the other one and tells him/her what the first one said. This has been a big improvement over the old, teacher-style explicit correction that we started with. It feels a lot more like growing participation. We're attempting to participate in host practices every time we open our mouths in Potwari, and our nurturer is really meeting us in our growth zone, and nurturing us. "Real nurturing" seems to grow more real with experience on the part of the nurturer. There can be no substitute for experience as a nurturer. Nevertheless, we are getting more and more ideas of what to include in pre-service nurturer training so that the subsequent experience can do its job.

Speaking of negotiation of form, I've mentioned that we've now abandoned "Here-and-Now Descriptions of Us" activities in the Phase 1 guide, in favour of the alternative, also mentioned in the Phase 1 guide, of using photos of "us". Potwari has a pretty complex system of person, number and gender marking in the "here-and-now" (such as present progressive and present state forms). So today, the instructions printed in the guide were for using "Here-and-Now Descriptions of Us," but with the GPs doing the talking rather than the nurturer as earlier on. Instead of doing "Here-and-Now Descriptions of Us" (where different ones of us do activities together or separately in various combinations, and describe what we're all doing), we took our big stack of digital photos of us and our nurturer and one other guy doing various activities in various combinations (I, we, you, you plural, etc.) Lots of fun took place sharpening the details of forms, as we negotiated form with our nurturer and with our fellow GP.

(By the way, in terms of nurturer training, there is probably an ongoing need to encourage nurturers to be glad when GPs help one another!)

Another point I  made today in my nurturer training had to do with pronunciation. Foreigners will vary in how bad their pronunciation is. So we talked about particularly emphasising mispronunciations that made words unintelligible, or that gave them wrong meanings, mentioning that nurturers need to hold some GPs to a lower standard than others, so that all can improve from where they are, since there is a lot of evidence that most improvement in pronunciation happens in the first six months. So it's good to always give some attention to it, but also to be realistic.

Clarification on how ACTFL *labels* mislead us

I don't know if people go back and read the comments to early posts, since there almost never are any! I wrote about  how ACFTL labels mislead career overseas workers into thinking they are more advanced than they are. 

Paul Sandrock, the ACTFL Director of Education responded kindly, and informatively, but I felt he misunderstood what I was saying. He wrote that "The ACTFL levels (like the government's ILR levels) describe the range of skills needed to function in real life situations, from highly predictable and controlled everyday situations (novice level) to situations requiring very sophisticated and extended discourse (distinguished level)." 

So in Prof. Sandrock's sense, if someone understands "Intermediate" or "Advanced" in terms of the ACTFL level descriptors, then that person won't be mislead, since the terms "Intermediate" and "Advanced" will have special, technical meanings, for them, rather than the more everyday understandings most people will have. 

But since most people don't have those technical understandings of the terms, they are hearing the words "Intermediate" and "Advanced" with their everyday meanings. (I keep mentioning these two labels, because they are about the only two I hear people ascribing to themselves.) For people without ACTFL's technical understandings of the words, the FSI/ILR labels such as "Elementary Proficincy" or "Survival Proficiency (rather than ACTFL's "Intermediate") and "Limited Working Proficiency" (rather than ACTFL's "Advanced") are more accurate, while the ACTFL labels (not the detailed descriptors) are generally--in reference to the long-term overseas career population--misleading. 

I feel that the reason that the ACTFL labels are misleading for that population, is that they were coined in a different context, with a different population in mind: school and university foreign language students. And for that originally intended population, the labels, "Intermediate," "Advanced" (etc.) are not at all misleading. They say the right thing.

So this is not to say that the detailed ACTFL descriptors do not validly cover the whole range of proficiency ("range of skills needed to function in real life situations"-- though I guess that could be a bit exaggerated in the opinion of some!), as do the FSI/ILR descriptors. It is only to say that whether the labels convey the right meaning in everyday English depends on the population to which they are being applied.

Does anyone not feel that "Intermediate Proficiency" means something different from "Survival Proficiency" in everyday English, or that "Advanced Proficiency" means something different from "Limited Working Proficiency" in everyday English? Is what should be considered "Advanced" for a university foreign language student, the same as what should be called "Advanced" for a long-term, overseas career person? In any case, I gave a clear example of someone who was misled into thinking he was more advance than he was, not be the level descriptors, but the the labels, and in fact I have met many such people.

I have great respect for the FSI/ILR/ACTFL OPI. The process has been honed over a couple of generations, and countless thousands of individual clients, and obviously has considerable validity (as well as some widely debated limitations). Things may have changed, but I felt in years past that the theoretical explanation for the pattern of development reflected in the discriptors was lacking. I once tried to provide a partial theoretical basis myself (Thomson, Greg. (1996).  "Hierarchical dependencies in comprehension abilities and the evolution of proficiency." Presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Applied Linguistics. London, Ontario, May 1996).

In saying that the labels mislead--when applied to the inappropriate population--I'm also affected by the way those labels (primarily "Intermediate" and "Advanced") are so widely bandied about by overseas workers who have a less than fully adequate idea what the labels are supposed to mean as technical terms, and also by "raters" who aren't adequately trained, if trained at all, and certainly not certified. This latter problem is not the fault of ACTFL, of course.

On more "things coming clear"

We're in Session 12 of Phase 1B, or about half way through Phase 1B, and well over half way through the First 100 hours, aiming for ten hours a week. A week or two into it, I wrote about how so much Potwari speech that was "mud to our hears" kept coming clearer--popping into focus--referring to both the sounds of Potwari and the individual words that we were focusing on (for example, in "Where is the man" the focus would be on the word "man").

More weeks have passed.

In recent sessions we're rejoicing that so much more detail is "coming clear". Our interactions with our nurturer are often long and complex and "natural" (within the restricted context of the particular activity, of course, but increasingly also in "meta-activity" comments while the kitchen timer ticks down during a "monolingual twenty minutes" or whatever). Now most of the other details (person, number, gender markings, oblique case markings, various function words) are "coming clear" much of the time. Based on what I concluded in doing my dissertation, I don't expect these grammatical elements to become "active" in our comprehension systems all at once. I'm convinced that that happens gradually over years. But neither are they "mud" to our ears. In that sense they are active--just not doing their actual jobs yet. They are not just filtered out as we listen, which I attribute in part to the structured input activities (and input flood nature of many other activities).

There is a lot of mystery in all this. Angela and I hold that our initial "L2 processor" is just the "L1 processor" (which Brian McWhinney also said somewhere), and it slowly develops an alternative system that gets better and better at processing the new language. (In the terms of those uncommon readers of this blog who like Universal Grammar, they could take this to mean that there is "full transfer; indirect access".) There is just no way we could be understanding and producing (with the help of nurture scaffolding) the amount and variety of speech that we are if we were starting from scratch--if this were our L1. That took years! So something in there is letting us do this in our L2 (well, L6, I guess) and I would say it is my L1 processor (with no small help from my L3, Urdu processor). What is happening in there is much, much too complex and language-dedicated to be the work of some general processor. Give me a break! But in any case, is it ever satisfying to see it happening once again! As I said in my dissertation thirteen years ago, "A self-aware, psycholinguistically literate second language learner is justified in marvelling at how soon the wall of sound starts to serve as a window—if perhaps a smoked-up window—to meaning."

I think many GPs marvel at the Phase 1 experience as well, but may not express it so pompously.
 

Next bits of ongoing nurturer training (includes naming sounds)

Here's a general point for various aspects of nurturer orientation: whenever a GP is struggling with a task, the nurturer asks himself or herself "How can I help him/her to succeed at this point in this task". We could have some mini-case studies!

Another general point: "Nurturer, the GPs may choose at times to answer as a team, not as individuals, each contributing something. It's up to them, not you!"

As Angela and I continue in information gap activities, the nurturer needs to understand that if the GPs constitute the two sides, then the point is for them to interact, and him/her to scaffold their efforts--meet them in their growth zone, but keep them interacting with each other. Suppose GP1 is supposed to be talking to GP2. So GP1 makes a comment to GP2. The nurturer may tend to step in, and make the whole thing into an interaction between him/her and GP1, ignoring GP2, and make it all about "how to say things" rather than primarily scaffolding the saying of the things. A coach can remind GP1 that s/he is talking to GP2, not to the nurturer. The nurturer needs to be reminded also. Another good strategy is to tell the nurturer, "When GP1 is struggling to say something to GP2, you tell GP2 what you understand GP1 to be trying to tell GP2; GP1 will hear that, and learn a lot from the way you said it without feeling s/he is being corrected at every word, and "learning how to say things" rather than getting her point across with your help."

The nurturer also needs to keep "explanation" to a minimum, or that will take over the activity. We found our nurturer frequently wanting to explain how we were mispronouncing, and how we should be pronouncing, though not really knowing the first thing about phonetics. We solved that by taking five minutes and finding six of our now-few-hundred familiar words that begin with four sounds that we kept confusing. These were words we would roughly translate as chin, hammer, tooth, frog, belly, navel. Those then became the names of the six sounds. So if a word contained the first sound in frog, and we pronounced it as the first sound in chin, he would point at his chin, and say (in Potwari), not chin—frog (pointing at our toy frog). Now in coming days we may add other such "names" for sounds we have a hard time discriminating. Note that they will be objects whose names we are already familiar with.

But there were other efforts at explanation that involved more than problem sounds. And so we finally just set the timer, and said, "No Urdu for 20 minutes. Potwari only. We can make notes, and after twenty minutes discuss any unresolvable issues in Urdu." Worked wonderfully.

By the time we finish Phase 1, I'll be ready to write a nurturer training course!

We are so thankful for a respectful, sincere, bright nurturer who learns quickly. Creative, too—he even scaffolds our body language sometimes, without our even having thought to suggest such a thing. We just wish we were learning Potwari as quickly as he is learning to nurture us.

A bit more nurturer training

This is the last bit I wanted to share after all the information gap stuff of Phase1B Session 8 (which I described a bit earlier today). As the days roll on, we continued our nurturer training. Today, we explained

1) Kinds of corrective feedback:
a) explicit correction
b) recasts
c) prompts

We haven't emphasised prompts in the past. Suppose I say, "They is in the lake". Instead of saying "No. Wrong. Say, 'They are in the lake'," (which would be explicit correction); or "Good. You're right. They are in the lake aren't they?" (which would be recasting) the nurturer says, "They is? They [pause to wait for me to say it differently]..." and I say, "They are in the lake". Well, prompts are a lot more like traditional teaching, aren't they? I think that is why our nurturer really latched onto them. In any case, we were always able to make the "corrections"-- to say whatever was the focus of feedback in the host like way rather than our newcomer way. Our nurturer obviously had a good sense of what he could prompt us about knowing we could "fix it".

We also explained  to him

2) Scaffolding (which meant in this case that when Angela and I tried to talk to one another in Potwari, the nurturer would be on the sideline, seeing what we were trying to say, and assisting us in a conversational way-- just enough so as to let us succeed, to let us reach higher than we could have reached without the scaffolding.)

3) Negotiation of meaning (lots of cool incidents in which we worked our way, conversationally, through something we set out to communicate--much of this not within the "game" but rather in our discussion of what we were doing and taking off on tangents)

As with the term "nurturer" itself, we teach these technical terms to the nurturer by first presenting the English term just as a peg, and then discussing in Urdu what it means, until such time as there might be an accepted Urdu translation. (Perhaps there already are such?) In the case of the term "nurturer", we keep using the English word as a loan word in our Urdu with the nurturer, and avoiding the Urdu word for "teacher" at all costs. I think it is probably clearer and clearer to the nurturer that we need a special term that is not "teacher".

Anyway, feedback, explicit correction, recasts, prompts, scaffolding and negotiation of meaning seem like valuable concepts and skills to explain as part of nurturer training.

That was sociocultural?

Back to this after talking about all the "person and number stuff," "information gaps," and structured input. Given the nature of Phase 1, we need to keep emphasising it, as people normally understand that "language" and "culture" are two different "things" which are "both" important. As we've said, people think that a hand-woven basket is part of "culture" while the word "basket" is part of language. In fact, both the basket, and the word are physical artefacts and "tools" passed down in the life of a community. It happens that when it comes to words and other physical artefacts, words are the far more crucial pieces of the culture, especially with their concepts attached, but even without. Just the sound form of "basket" is an amazing piece of "culture".  Thousands upon thousands of those phonetic forms (words as spoken and heard) work together to enable a community to be what it is.

So considering the Session 8 activities described a couple of posts back, and the structured input activities in the immediately previous post, let's think of how sociocultural these experiences were for us:

1) They were intensely interactive with a host person.
2) That person was playing with us in ways that let us grow. (The activities were game-like.)
3) We were increasing our familiarity with those key physical, "cultural" artefacts that we call words.
3) Our association of each word with a particular object, emotion, action etc. was participation in a specific host practice!
4) The nurturer determined the objects we talked about, such as parts of the town scene.
5) In nurturing us into using host-like person, number and gender morphology the nurturer was future nurturing us into host practices
6) The nurturer emphasised body language as well as spoken words.
7) In all of this, the nurturer was spending time (3.5 hours in this case)  interacting with us in our growth zone.
etc.

Angela and I sit there (straining our brains and) watching ourselves grow. It is satisfying. I hope the point that languaculture is not "language and culture" is gaining graspers. Growing participation means being nurtured into an ever-growing range of host practices in a rational, orderly, rapid, effective way. Most of the first practices we appropriate are words, which open the way into so much else, including understanding what host experiences mean to host people.

O.K., I'll admit that structured input can be dangerous. It can take over the wheel. In reality it is just a small portion of what we do. Andrew Farley, in his book on structured input, referred to in an earlier post, is a solid cognitivist, who talks in terms of "teaching...aspects of the language," in various ways including structured input. However, even with such his cognitivist orientation, he complains that, "...sometimes instructors demonstrate through the design of their lesson plans an unbalanced preference (almost an obsession) for teaching grammar to the exclusion of other aspects of the target language".

Still, in the GPA we use structured input (and input flooding and output flooding and "record for feedback") in strategic ways. In our opinion, though, it would be better to drop "grammar instruction" altogether and keep people growing across a broad front than to let grammar teaching re-occupy the driver seat.

We saw a case recently where someone was trying to do a "modified GPA" which to their mind meant requiring "learners" to study all sorts of grammatical facts that were, at the point they were presented,  irrelevant to anything going on in the Phase 1 activities at that point. I kept asking,   why that bit of grammar today? To what end? I hear the words of Sir Edmond Hillary: "Because it is there".

Back to SI (Structured Input)

There would have been no hope, in Potwari, of doing those Session 8 activities described in the previous post, had not a moderate amount of SI (Structured Input) prepared us for it. We are pretty much abandoning what are called, in the Phase 1 guide, "Here-and-now descriptions of us" in favour of photographs in which various combinations of us, the nurturer and others are engaging in actions. The nurturer asks questions such as, "In which picture am I running? In which picture are we lying down? In which picture are they jumping?" etc. This version is described in the Phase 1 guide as an option, but that was before digital pictures made it so easy. So it is really the way to go.

As we point out, these activities need to be developed anew for each languaculture. We are getting better at it as time goes on. If you are able to develop these in your situation and haven't, please get going on it, as you'll improve with experience.

Andrew Farley, in Structured Input: Grammar Instruction for the Acquisition-Oriented Classroom, has as his first "pitfall", "not presenting one thing at a time." We would say "one contrast at a time". To use English as a (bit of a strained) example, we might be emphasising the forms of auxiliary be, as in

"Show me the picture in which...
you are running
I am walking
he is jumping
they are walking
etc."

Now as you know, if you've been in recent LLA Courses, the problem here is that GPs hear the you, I, he, they, etc. in the sentences, and also have to pay attention to the verb-- running, walking, jumping, reading, etc. in order to point at the correct picture. The auxiliary be, is for reasons that no one understands (and some people claim they do) is cognitively far more demanding, and it just goes by in the sentence lifelessly, as though it isn't there. So we must force ourselves to pay attention to it by omitting the pronoun you, I, he, they, etc.

"Show me the picture in which...
are running
am running
is jumping
are walking

Now if the auxiliary be form is am, the person will point at pictures in which "I" ( the speaker--the nurturer) am dong the action. If the form is are, he could point at pictures in which, they, you and we are doing the same action referred to in the sentence. We've done things like that.

However, this is not presenting one thing at a time. So let's start without any main verb, taking advantage of the fact that copula be has the same forms as auxiliary be. Then we have sentences such as "Show me the picture in which I am," "...you are" etc.. Then, omitting the pronouns, the nurture just says

"Show me the picture in which
am
is
are

And the GP points to the picture of the speaker (nurture) for am, and some third person for his. We wouldn't use the are form for all three functions of second person (you are) third person plural (they are) and first person plural (we are). We would limit it to you at first. Now, once the GP can readily point correctly upon hearing am, is and are, we can go back to auxiliary be, but always using the same action, such as

am running
is running
are running

Once that is easy, continue using multiple actions

am running
is walking
are walking
am reading
etc.

Finally, all three functions of the are form are included, so that when the GP hears are running s/he has three pictures to point at.

Do you see how we gradually built up to this, rather than starting with it?

Now the GP is easily hearing and understanding auxiliary be with all it's forms. This auxiliary no longer "goes by in the sentence lifelessly as though it isn't there". Now it has taken on meaning. It is noticeable. It has been activated for the processor. It will still require considerable experience with it, but the experience can happen now, since the auxiliary is not simply filtered out by the listening comprehension process.

Sticking in the here and now in Phase 1

Today we did Phase 1A session 8. It's getting more exciting! A common complaint people voice to us is that it isn't clear in the face pictures what emotion each represents. But by this point, those faces have taken on such a life as part of our shared story with our nurturer that I hate to think what we'd have lost if we had skipped them. They mean whatever you agree with your nurturer that they mean.

This session involved lots of here-and-now ("present progress" and "stative") descriptions of actions and situations, employing a visual barrier to create an information gap (see the Phase 1 guide for the details).

In Activity 3, it was "I'm cutting out the angry man," which the other side responded to with "You're cutting out the angry man". Now in Chinese this would go fast. In Potwari, person and number are more complicated, and it is a struggle. The interaction continues until the pictures are all cut out.

That prepared us for Activity 4, where we were putting pictures in places in the town scene. One GP would be picking up, say, the angry man, and putting him, say, on the dome of the mosque, while the nurturer told the second GP what the first was doing. What the nurture said, the GP could not have come close to saying (partly because the descriptions of the town scene are still weakly remembered). However, having heard the nurturer the first GP could agree, saying what "I" was doing. The second GP then confirmed with the first, by telling the first what "you" are doing, while doing the same. In fact, the GPs versions were rarely verbatim repetitions (with person changes) of what the nurturer said. That's is because the GPs are able to describe the person, action and place in a variety of ways, and what they said was original, though far better than it would have been without the nurturer's having talked first. As they struggled, the nurturer would provide "scaffolding" so that even though their utterance was original, it was well formed, relatively well pronounced, and true to the situation.

For this activity to work, the one doing the "doing" (say, putting the angry man on the dome of the mosque) needs to do it very slowly, or the activity quickly becomes past! There is a temptation to do just that. We mustn't. This is our chance to hear and produce a lot of here-and-now language, which we believe has a cognitive precedence anyway. We typically find that here-and-now language is much more complicated than "past" and "future" language, and GPs who skimp on it in Phase 1 when it comes most naturally, will often never really get it in the long run.

Let the here-and-now be here and now. According the the U.S. government level descriptions, we won't really be able to "narrate in the past tense" (thus really needing the "past tense" a lot) until Level 2 (Limited Working Proficiency), which in the Six-Phase Programme pretty much means some time in Phase 3. In fact, "past tense" forms do creep into Phase 1 often enough anyway, without our trying to emphasise them. The real challenge is to stay in the mode of here-and-now communication and get that foundation.

Another peek into the GPA for blog eavesdroppers

A Little Invitation to the Growing Participator Approach

Starting point is not “the learner”, but the host people

The starting point for understanding growing participation is not “the learner”. Rather, it is the host people. This is the vantage point from which the GP chooses to view the process. It is other centred. It is always asking, "Who am I in their experience now?" The starting point is thus not something abstract and theoretical, but an actual, literal community of right-now, living, breathing, walking, talking, densely interconnected, interacting people. That community’s members mediate their shared experience and thinking by means of their particular shared symbols and tools. Their joint life is also an ongoing lived story, continuously under construction (and reconstruction) and dependent on the unique, shared story-construction pieces the community has at its disposal. Their lived story is a stream of goal-directed human action, enabled by their shared practices. Many of the actions involve talking and listening, which in fact dominate the stream of human action in many ways, though they are inseparable from the stream as a whole. Growing participators following the GPA want that community to take them into itself, making them right-now, living, breathing, walking, talking participants in it. Only members of that community can do that, by granting GPs the status of “legitimate peripheral participants” and interacting with them in their growth zones (nee “zones of proximal development”).

First dimension is the sociocultural one

Growing participation begins when one or more members of that community are confronted with a newcomer who has no ability to follow their practices, their lived story, and thus who is unable to participate in the host world, but who want to do so. Host people will succeed in nurturing newcomers into their world if they interact adequately with them in their growth zone. Trained GPs know how to facilitate the host people’s efforts. (It begins with “play” and ends with “serious business”!)

Host people initially experience the newcomer as a relative non-entity in their lived story—someone who can be a limited topic within the story, but not a participant in its continuing construction. The newcomer presents a relatively “blank face” to host people within their story, having little identity among them beyond whatever stereotypes there are for this particular variety of outsider. As host people nurture the newcomer into their world, that relatively blank face increasingly takes on unique personal features and character. Slowly a special person emerges and evolves into a full-blown participant in the construction of the host story.

As a second dimension (and not a second component), the cognitive dimension is thoroughly sociocultural throughout

Host people themselves primarily came to know their languacultural world in early childhood because older people talked to them, and around them, about the contexts in which they found themselves. GPs following the GPA want host people to talk to them about much that they observe in the host context. Until host people have talked to the GPs adequately (in the host language, not the GPs language), GPs are simply converting what they “observe” in the context into the meanings that those “observed” objects and events would have in their own home worlds. The GP needs to be nurtured into host mental life, which is inherently and thoroughly social. Early on, being talked to by host people in host ways (and understanding what they hear!) is the path into host mental life for GPs. In time, hearing host people talk to one another will also provide much of the path to further mental growth.

In the cognitive dimension, comprehension processes are primary

For that reason, and also because listening to and understanding host people is an act of love and self-giving, comprehension ability—the ability to hear speech and grasp the story that it arouses in host hearers—comes first in the GPA value system. Spoken production ability is secondary and derivative. In the very early days, in fact, the GPA advocates learning to understand speech while personally remaining silent and responding nonverbally to the nurturer. This is another facet of centering growing participation around the host people and their needs and gifts: listening first!

Among the wide range of host practices, their use of a massive stock of words and common word combinations is central. Each word is a host practice! Therefore whenever GPs are learning to understand host words and word combinations, from the very first moments of growing participation, he is seriously appropriating key practices of the host people—aspects of their speaking practices that will be open the way to so much further growth.

Conversational interaction comes next

Since conversational interaction ability is second in importance only to comprehension ability, during the early days of growing participation, the GPs soon add two-way spoken interaction to their efforts at appropriating host practices by listening alone. Two-way conversation in which host people meet the GPs in their growth zone is the engine of the GPs’ development of their own internal host mental life. If you listen in (with understanding!) on a GP and a nurturer interacting in the GP’s growth zone, you’ll “see” the GP’s mental development happening right out in the open. A GP’s mental development in this new world is, as a minimum, a two-person process. Internal to the GP, there is a process of “resonance” going on in all conversations: As the GP and host person engage together in discourse in a particular area, the GP’s speech in that discourse area is being moulded in the direction of the nurturer’s speech. For example, in conversing about weather, over time the GP is drawn to talk about weather more and more similarly to the ways in which the nurturer talks about  weather—and so on with a wide variety of discourse areas.

In conversational interaction, comprehension ability continues to hold a special place. Comprehension saves! As long as the GPs understand what is said to them by a host conversation partner, they can find some way, by hook or by crook (using “communication strategies” and “negotiating meaning”) to respond to the conversation partner so as to get their point across. However, if the GPs are unable to understand much of what the host person is saying, they are “up a creek without a paddle” (stuck) in the conversation. Embarrassing!

As comprehension ability enables conversational interaction, so conversational interaction is also of major importance in the development of comprehension ability. It is an upward spiral. Host people relate to GPs conversationally in ways they can handle (in their growth zone). They also assist (“scaffold”) the GP in responding intelligibly.

“Accuracy” (We prefer to say, “host-likeness”.)

The GPA encourages GPs to pay attention to host patterns of conversational turn-taking, issues of appropriateness (pragmatics), style (for example, talking as host people talk, not as they write), etc. At the level of individual sentences, the GPA holds that sounding host-like in narrow terms of grammar and pronunciation is less important than sounding host-like in those broader ways. The speech of most GPs will forever contain non-host-like “errors,” even in the case of GPs who happen to be obsessed with grammar. In addition, they will always speak with an accent. Mercifully, the frequency of “grammar errors” can decrease over time. The GPA advocates strategies that facilitate movement toward host-sounding grammar in spoken production. These include input flooding, structured input and “record yourself for feedback” and “focus on form”. Such activities, without abandoning the spirit of two-way interaction with the nurturer, strongly draw much attention to grammatical form, thus raising awareness, leading to gradual improvement. However, we keep in mind that the first role of grammar for host people is in comprehension, not in spoken production. (Grammatical elements are primarily comprehension cues.) To the extent that grammatical features come to function in host-like ways in GPs’ comprehension processes, the GPs will become increasingly sensitive to ways in which their own speech is not host-like, since their own speech will clash with their own comprehension processes.

A similar principle applies to pronunciation. The GPA encourages GPs to work toward host-like hearing,  as the biggest contributors toward more host-like pronunciation. Considerable progress in the intelligibility of GPs’ pronunciation needs to be made early in the process of growing participation. Ideally, some specific coaching in pronunciation will also be provided by a language learning advisor. Still, learning to hear well will have an impact over the long haul, and that can be achieved without a phonetics coach, by using “sound discrimination” activities that involve live interaction with a nurturer.

Literacy and bi-languaculturalism or multi-languaculturalism

In some people groups, host practices will involve reading and writing in various ways.  In line with the role and importance of literacy practices in host life, GPs will be nurtured into them at the optimal time.

The host practices may also involve host people’s participation in the languacultural world of neighbouring people groups or the larger national community (bi-languaculturalim or multi-languaculturalism). As life goes on and time permits, GPs are nurtured into these aspects of host life as well (for example, nurtured into using a “national language” for functions that host people use the national language for). Growing participation is a long road. That brings us to…

The time dimension is more than a footnote in the GPA

The GPA makes much of time. The GPA paints a picture of change over time in both the Sociocultural and Cognitive Dimensions. The way host people experience GPs,  and the GPs’ roles and identities in the host story, should change steadily from the time of arrival to the end of the sojourn. The GPA tries to be realistic about how much can happen how soon, while also providing a roadmap and (when combined with the Six-Phase Programme or a similar one) a detailed set of activities to perpetuate steady change.

The GPA is concerned that GPs reach a path of self-sustaining growth, where they cannot stop growing—as long as they don’t stop participating—because they understand almost everything they hear host people say and observe host people doing, so that what they hear and see is always feeding their further growth. Until they clearly reach Phase 6, GPs need to keep employing “supercharged participation sessions,” with special host people—usually nurturers who are paid for their time. As special nurturers, and other host people with whom GPs share life continue to nurture them into the host world, increasingly the fruits of those host people’s nurturing efforts are a spring of pleasure to them! Growing Participation, after all, starts and ends with them, not with me.

Chart on ILR Levels and the 6-Phase Programme

I've added the following chart to the Growing Participator Resources public folder:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gh4zldxayplmz9v/E-XJshk9Yx/ILR%20Levels%20and%20the%206-Phase%20Program%20Nov%202012.docx

The whole folder can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/growingparticipators

How ACTFL *labels* misinform us

Awhile ago, I met a Canadian who lives and works in China. He told me something like this:

"I did a proficiency interview over the phone. They told me that after being here for seven years, I'm 'Intermediate High'. I'm not yet 'Advanced' but at least I'm 'Intermediate High'. I feel pretty good about that."

"Intermediate High" and "Advanced" are labels for proficiency levels used by the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages and chosen for rating "learners" who have been learning a language in school or university classes in America, without living and working where the language is normally used. Those labels therefore don't apply to that guy in China, nor to you or me if we're living and working abroad in the country where the language is regularly used. For our situations, the corresponding labels would be "'Survival Proficiency' with some features of 'Limited Working Proficiency'" ( for "Intermdiate High") and "Limited Working Proficiency" (for "Advanced"). These are the US government labels designed to describe those who live and work where the language is regularly used, not people taking language classes in schools and universities in the US.

So now, let's translate that guy's report from the misleading ACTFL labels to the appropriate US government (FSI/ILR) labels:

"I did a proficiency interview over the phone. They told me that after being here for seven years, I have 'Survival Proficiency' with some features of 'Limited Working Proficncy'. I'm not yet at the level of  'Limted Working Proficiency' but at least I'm at 'Survival proficiency' with some features of 'Limited Working Proficiency'. I feel pretty good about that."

After 7 years, would he really feel good to hear this? We need to use the right labels in the right contexts, or we are telling innocent people something other than the truth!

A quote from the coiner of "languaculture"

"First, culture becomes visible only when an outsider encounters it, and what becomes visible depends on the LC1 of the outsider. There could be a big difference; there could be a little difference; and the translation would vary accordingly. Second, culture is relational. It is the property of no one and exists only as a translation enabler between LC1 and LC2, its content, again, being a function of which LC1 and LC2 define the boundary." (Michael Agar in International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (2) June 2006).

I love this quote. I first came across the idea in the Wikipedia article on "languaculture": "According to Agar, culture is a ... translation between source languaculture and target languaculture. Like a translation, it makes no sense to talk about the culture of X without saying the culture of X for Y..." I imagine if I look back, I'll find the same idea in Agar's book Language Shock. 

In our terms, Agar is saying that a "culture" is always and only a "they story"! Think that through. Get it? (Our GPA concept of "they stories" derives from the Vygotskyan concept of mediation, which I wish Agar had thought about. )

It's not a culture to be learned, but a story to be lived.

Talking and listening, still early in Phase 1B

We're into "16 Pictures".

(O.K., if you're just an eavesdropper, it goes like this: There are identical pairs of sixteen little scenes and a barrier so that the GPs and the nurturer cannot see each other's scenes. The nurturer has to ask the GPs questions in order to arrange his scenes in the same order as theirs. It took us half an hour to get through four simple scenes. The next session, the nurturer and GPs change roles, the GPs having seen how the nurturer asks such questions as "How many mountains are in your picture? Is there a girl on the second mountain?" It must all be done monolingually.)

It is still exciting to see once again how this activity really gets the nurturer conversing with the GPs. There is relatively little to talk about in the scenes--trees, rivers, mountains, hills, houses, boys, girls, and locations. Such a simple little activity, yet such a sense of transition. Our host identity has begun to appear before the nurturer in a tiny way, well out of the limelight of the big host world. Just before this we did family photos, which also contributed to our suddenly emerging host personhood within the experience of the nurturer.

Then we did a new dirty dozen. All the talking has really changed how I listen, as we say it should. I think we have basically the right timing in that connection--a Phase when talking would interfere with hearing (and hence is prohibited), but then soon a need to talk in order to keep hearing better. In the Ladder of Success activity, it was clear that our pronunciation wasn't working so well. Now, under the pressure to communicate, it would be easy to take pronunciation for granted as long as it "works". Gotta watch that.

So we also started doing the "sound sorting activity" arranging words (that is, their pictures from our growing picture dictionary) in columns such that each contains the same sound in a particular position. We chose first-syllable vowels as the basis for grouping into columns this time. It worked really well.

Well, Angela is offering me herbal tea with jalebi. See you!

A short paper on current topics in the GPA

Don't know if I can post something this long, but if it works, it may help those who come here wondering what the GPA even is.

The Growing Participator Approach (GPA):

A Brief State of the Art and Some Practical Illustrations

by Greg Thomson

March 2012

More and more in our international travels we’re encountering people who begin to describe to us a “new language learning method” that they have either observed or heard about. They are surprised when we say, “That’s us!” It seems it is high time for a clarification of what is meant by the “Growing Participator Approach” (GPA)

At the outset, we need to make some distinctions. Anthony (1963) distinguishes most helpfully between

1.     Approach, (“a set of … assumptions dealing with the nature of language and the nature of language teaching and learning”)

2.     Method, (“an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, …based upon the selected approach”) and

3.     Technique (what actually “takes place in the classroom”).

The people referred to above who describe this “new method” may refer to it as “the new method where you don’t talk”. They sometimes described techniques they had actually witnessed in their overseas context. They had little or no idea of the actual method, which, although it spells out techniques for an initial non-talking period of thirty hours, it also spells out techniques for an additional 1,470 hours in which talking plays an important role. They had even less of an idea of the approach, which doesn’t specify how many non-talking hours there should be, but holds that there should be some initial non-talking period, and furthermore that this emphasis on listening and understanding will play a central role all the way along.

In our courses and workshops, there is indeed 1) an approach, 2) a method, and 3) techniques.

1.     The APPROACH: the Growing Participator Approach (GPA), highlighted in this paper, which includes the

a)    Sociocultural Dimension

b)   Cognitive Dimension

c)    Temporal Dimension.

2.     The METHOD: the Six-Phase Programme, a plan for activities that that may take 1500 hours to carry out, structured in such a way that the activities become increasingly advanced as the user becomes increasingly advanced, and they are keyed to the sociocultural/human-relationship changes and cognitive changes that the growing participator (GP) undergoes.

3.     The TECHNIQUES used in the Six-Phase Programme are numerous, ranging from TPR activities in a format we call the Dirty Dozen, to life-story interviewing, to discussions in the host language of recorded real-life, native-to-native discourses.

If people employing the techniques have embraced the GPA(pproach), while those observing the techniques have not, then the activities (or as we like to say, the story) that the observers are experiencing as they look on is radically different from the activities (story) being experienced (being lived) at the same moment by those being observed. This is because “all perception is theory laden” (a quote that is widely repeated without attribution, but from Richard Gregory, a perceptual psychologist).

The outsider-observer of the activities is drawing on his-her own ‘folk theory’ of language learning (Miller & Ginsberg, 1995). In some cases observers may also draw on more explicitly-learned theories of second language acquisition or language pedagogy, as they construct their story of what those following the GPA and using the techniques they observe, are doing. Still, what it is that the story the observer experiences, and the lived-story being experienced by those being observed, differ profoundly. What the outsider to the activities experiences (laden, as it is, with his/her “theory”) is what we will refer to below as a “they story,” while the story experienced by those being observed is the lived story. (In applying these concepts already, we are leading you into the GPA!)

In short, what I primarily want to do today is give you a better idea of the approach of the GPA, so that if you encounter the techniques, you will at least realise that there is another framework for understanding them, beside the framework you are using to interpret them. In fact, we find that when people say they are “modifying the GPA,” more often than not, they mean they are trying to use techniques from the Six-Phase Programme within their own approach, which is not in fact the GPA at all. (Happily, there are also many people who make improvements to the techniques that show an understanding of the approach.)

LANGUAGE LEARNING IS SOCIOCULTURAL

The sociocultural dimension of languaculture learning/growth is the fundamental one, and the natural starting point. For this, we draw on Vygotskyan Sociocultural Theory, and especially on the concepts of mediation and the growth zone (ZPD) (Wertsch, 1991), along with the understanding of language learning as participation (Sfard, 1998; Norton, 2000), seeing language not as fundamentally “a collection of things (grammatical concepts, word patterns, etc.) for the learner to ‘collect, absorb and assimilate,’” (Benson & Lor 1999) but rather as “an environment to which the learner must be responsive in order to learn” (ibid.). These brief allusions to our intellectual roots in the GPA fail to arouse much of the GPA sense of languaculture learning as a living, social, personal/interpersonal phenomenon. Although the GPA accepts a strong social constructionism, in practice we resist abstract intellectualization and depersonalization.

The (ZPD) is what the GP can do with a bit of help from a host person that s/he could not quite manage without such help. Being met and helped in one’s ZPD spells powerful growth. We find it communicates better to rename the ZPD the “growth zone”.

We will talk repeatedly of what it is that the GP is nurtured into. At this point, we can say that the GP is nurtured into the life of a people group by being nurtured into specific lives of special individuals. Because nurturing the GP in the early days is hard work, even when it is done through play (!), it may require a hired, paid nurturer. Over time, as interacting with the GP takes less and less effort on the part of host people, a growing variety of host people wil find it worth the effort. Eventually, the relationship of host people to the GP will seem less like nurturing, and more like apprenticing them into maturity in the host languacultural world. Any host person willing to spend time interacting with the GP in his/her growth zone is an expert/master in relation to whom the GP is an apprentice, even if often only momentarily. (To be a normal host person is to be an expert in the host languaculture.) A large number of people may unwittingly enter the nurturing relationship or the master-to-apprentice (expert-to-apprentice) relationship with us. Some will be our major nurturers/masters/experts supporting us in our efforts to do what they do by letting us participate with them in what they do. The early nurturers especially, and later major masters, will be remembered as major players in the cast of the GPs overall life narrative.

MEDIATION AND “THEY STORIES”

This is perhaps the most important concept, for us at least, in sociocultural theory, as it leads us to our understanding of the uniqueness of each languacultural world, and what it means to be nurtured into it through participation.

We humans don’t experience the world directly, but rather our experience of it is mediated—reaching us (or we reaching it) through intermediate means, which intervene between the world and us, in the process, altering what we take the world to be. Preeminent among those mediational means are tools (such as hammers, roads, houses) and symbols (such as spoken words). In other words, these mediational means, as they mediate our experience (and our thoughts), enrich and contribute tremendously to the constitution and course of the world as we know it. (Knowledge of the world is social and sociohistorical. The resources that enable and constrain the ongoing shared story-construction that is the life of a people group are a social heritage).

Take this example: I see what to me is a “small bowl”, but a Kazakh sees as a kece and a Korean sees as a babgueruet. Now, unless you and I are participants in the Korean or Kazakh world, there is no way I can really tell you what the Korean or Kazakh sees. Oh, I can tell you that the Korean is surprised to see the Kazakh drinking tea from a babgueret, and the Kazakh is surprised to see the Korean eating rice from a kece, but given that “rice,” “eat,” “drink,” and “tea” are my Anglo-Canadian story-constructing pieces (symbolic mediational means), you and I haven’t really told each other what the Kazakh, or the Korean, is experiencing. Kazakh shai is a different experience indeed from English tea, while Korean cha is a different experience from both. On the other hand, I can tell you, as my fellow North American (or more widely, fellow native Anglophone), “Kazakhs drink tea from a small bowl.” You understand what I mean, since we mediate life by the same means, but what might be offered as a Kazakh translation, Қазактар кеселерден шай ішейде, is something quite different from “Kazakhs drink tea from a small bowl”. Though the small bowl/kece/babgueret, the tea/shai/cha, etc., etc. may involve one and the same physical entities, those physical entities become “pieces of life” through the way they are mediated to us by our symbols. Every one of the little “pieces of life” from which the Kazakh story is constructed are different from all of the little “pieces of life” from which the Anglo-Canadian story is constructed. Thus, we say the actual Kazakh story, made with Kazakh story-constructing pieces is their lived story, whereas my observations of the Kazakhs drinking “tea” from a “small bowl” is my “they story”, constructed out of my Anglo-Canadian languacultural story-making pieces. The lived-story and the “they story” are different stories indeed. We live in different worlds, even when in the same physical world, with different events taking place (again, which aren’t different physically), and different stories being lived. I can only come to know the lived story of Kazakhs if Kazakhs adequately nurture me and apprentice me into that story which they are living.

In brief, the GP is being nurtured and then apprenticed into using the host mediational means—story constructing pieces—in the way that they are used in the lived story of host people.

Words are similar to tools

A word has two parts, the phonetic part and the conceptual part. The phonetic part is like the handle of a tool (say a shovel handle), and the conceptual part like the head of the tool (say, the shovel blade). It is the head of the tool that does the work of the tool, carrying out its specific function, but it is the handle that enables people to take hold of the tool and put it to work. So it is with the conceptual part of a word (which does the work, carries out the function of the word) and the phonetic part (which allow us to “take hold of” the word, and use it in listening or talking).

The new GP, in the early weeks of growing participation, quickly attaches her native languacultural “tool heads”(concepts) to the host people’s “tool handles” (the phonetic part—how the words sound and are uttered). Dealing with the new host words in this way, the GPs rapidly achieve a quick and dirty understanding of thousands of words in the host language. Over time, as the GP participates extensively in host discourses (see below), those words increasingly are understood more nearly as host people understand them.

discourses (small “d”) and Discourses (capital “D”)

Think of everything that might typically be said by a customer, by fellow customers, and by a cashier at a check-stand in a grocery store. All of that which is said is what linguists call a “discourse”. But in and of themselves, the discourses don’t exist! There is much activity interwoven with the talking, and the talking itself is not something separate from the activity as a whole, but an inextricable constituent of an “alloy” that is the activity. The activity includes within it people filling roles, such as cashier (and possibly other staff), and customer, and fellow customer. The roles are not separable from what is said, and often what is said is combined with objects and gestures (as when the cashier picks up a can of beans and says, “Did you notice the price of this?”  The flow of activity also include other objects— the cash register, the conveyer belt, the scale, the bags and all the rest. There are expectations regarding what might be done physically and what might be said in synchrony with that.

This whole flow of action that includes the discourse is the Discourse (with a capital “D”).

In brief, a growing participator is thus being nurtured, and then apprenticed, into the Discourses (capital “D”) of the host languacultural world (with its inextricable talking), including its human roles, as it participates with the support of nurturers/masters.

Another important sense of “discourse”—ongoing community-wide discussions.

Unfortunately, the word “discourse” is used without qualification in various senses. In the social sciences, and more and more in academic writing in general, and even in the public sphere, you hear expressions such as “the American discourse about politics”. In this sense, “discourses” are on-going “conversations” or “discussions” within a whole people group or certain subgroups within it: the discourse about the war, the discourse about breast feeding, the discourse about the new bridge, the discourse about sickness and death, and so on and so forth, the discourse about the supernatural, the discourse about foreigners, etc.

For clarity when we need it, we can distinguish these community-wide “conversations” from individual discourses (what is said in concrete situations) and Discourses (what is said, plus everything else that goes into the situation) by calling them “on-going discourses,” or “on-going community-wide conversations/discussions”. Often, though, context makes clear which “discourses” we are referring to.

In brief, the GP is being nurtured through participation in host discourses and Discourses, and perhaps even more crucially, being nurtured into the “ongoing discourses” to which all host people are party.

Experience as narrative

A narrative is made from the story-construction pieces we discussed above—especially words (and frequent word combinations), with their conceptual part (tool head) and their phonetic part (tool handle). As we build a spoken narrative, events of the narrative are presented in narrative settings (described in the narrative), and listeners connect particular events in a narrative to other events in the narrative “logically”, for example, seeing one event as following from another, as causing another, as foreseeing another, as flashing back to another and so on. The “lived narrative” of your or my present experience is much the like a spoken narrative (Bruner, 1990). We make a story out of lived events right as we experience them, creating such “logical” connections between, for example, relating two events as cause-effect, reason-result, etc.

Just as later events in a spoken narrative cause us to reinterpret earlier events, so events in the lived narrative of experience cause us to reinterpret earlier experiences. Events in both spoken and lived narratives are generally compatible with our broad expectations. When they are not, we tend to come up with stories about the unexpected events in an attempt to convert them into something that would have been more expectable, given the new information we add to account for them (Bruner, 1990). This is true in spoken narratives and in lived narratives.

In brief, growing participators are nurtured and apprenticed into the ongoing narratives of individual host lives, and as a result, into the bigger shared narrative that the host people are living together. Eventually, the GPs “they stories” have died away to a large extent, and the GP is sharing in the lived story of the host community, making their unique co-contributions to its future course.

Cultural models

This is another helpful concept from Gee (1999). A cultural model is basically the whole body of knowledge related to some coherent area of life and known in common (co-known) by members of the speech community. Gee argues that the meanings of words are “situated”. That is, a word does not have a precise meaning or list of precise alternative meanings as displayed in a dictionary. Rather, a word activates a holistic cultural model from which the listener infers a coherent picture. Gee’s examples are

1.     The coffee spilled; get a broom.

2.     The coffee spilled; get a mop.

In the former, the picture may contain coffee grounds, and in the latter the picture may contain a dark brown puddle. We could make a dictionary which listed meanings (1) and (2) under the entry coffee. However, we quickly find that we just keep multiplying the meanings of coffee as we encounter it in new contexts. For example, in the right context of an evening stroll in Ethiopia, coffee might evoke a picture containing the aroma of coffee blossoms.

In brief, the GP is nurtured into wide-ranging co-knowing of reality—the cultural models of everyday life that become the means of creating the situated meanings of words dynamically during the process of  listening to host speech.

Languaculture and languacultural worlds

Agar (1995) felt that linguists have tried to draw a circle around a part of culture, call it “language” and then strive to stay within the circle in order elucidate their chosen segment of reality. The goal of Agar’s book was to start erasing the circle. I might agree with theoretical linguists that the advancement of knowledge has benefitted enormously from the way they drew the boundary between language and the rest of human experience, but other linguists—sociolinguists, pragmaticsists, discourse analysts—long ago burst out of the circle from the inside. Agar is erasing the circle from without, from the perspective of the whole of culture.

The notion of languaculture reminds me of the notion of Discourse (capital “D”). There is one flow of human action, in which talking plays a crucial role, but actions that employ talking are not separate from the rest or the mix. Rather they are part of the same stream of action. On a micro-level, in my home languaculture you can wait back a certain distance from the doorway for me to go ahead of you as a sign of respect, or you might add some talking to the mix, for example, uttering the word, “Please!” while standing back (and perhaps also gesturing toward the doorway with your forearm) but whichever of these possibilities you include, the complex action is a unified act of putting me ahead of you. And who puts whom ahead of whom is controlled by complex and subtle social factors (which include emotions and values). (I recall competing with an East Asian for the responsibility of holding back while the other went through the doorway. My “they story” about his behaviour was that he was reacting to my senior age, while I was reacting to the fact that he was the guest and I was the host.)

Agar uses the example of second person pronouns (and second person agreement) in German. Person and number in pronouns and verb agreement  are classical matters of “grammar” to traditional language learners. Yet Agar found that their actual role in the so-called familiar/polite distinction in life, beyond the simplest cases, turned out to be puzzling to him, even after many years, despite the fact that language teachers think they have explained the distinction to their students on day 1 (well, day 2, perhaps, since day 1 is “The Alphabet”).

This puzzling matter of polite/familiar second person pronoun usages is what Agar calls a rich point: something that surprises and puzzles the newcomer, and is, in fact, the tip of an iceberg of languacultural difference, and misunderstanding, or non-understanding.

In brief, a GP is being nurtured and apprenticed into a languaculture, or a languacultural world. (I most often prefer to say languacultural world rather than simply languaculture. For me the latter has more of a cognitivist feel to it, while the former feels more sociocultural.)

Identity and “language learning”

If learning is participation (in which host people spend time interacting with newcomers in their growth zone), then when, how much and with whom one gets to participate—and thus grow—depends on who the host people take the growing participator to be at a given point. Initially, the GP has only the identity of a foreigner belonging to a particular stereotype. If s/he is to keep growing, then eventually s/he will need to be recognised by enough host people as someone who belongs in social situations within the host languacultural world as a contributor (and not as a mere visitor, onlooker or object of curiosity). In most cases s/he may never be seen as “one of us” by the society as a whole. However, within particular social networks (say, a particular extended family) and communities of practice (say, a church congregation) s/he may indeed come to be experienced by host people as “one of us” with his/her foreignness perhaps taking on a quality that is even appreciated as a unique enrichment of life within the group.

The notion of community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991 and Wenger, 1998) is important in the GPA. It refers to a group of people with shared purposes, shared understanding of who they are and of who belongs and who doesn’t, and constituted by its shared practices.

Keeping with the deeply personal nature of the GPA, we emphasise the reality that a specific new person, a “new me” comes into view right before the eyes of those very host people who nurture that new person into existence and who apprentice that new person along in ever-growing maturity.

This understanding of the GP as an emerging person in the host languacultural world can be related to recent work on language learning motivation, framed in terms of a “self-system” (Dörnyei, 2005). Each person has an actual self, a possible self and a dreaded self, among other “selves”. It is with this in mind that we cast the issue of identity and the self in terms of “the ‘new me’ that the host people experience now, and the ‘later new me’ who I can next become in their experience”. If a desirable “new me” comes to be seen as a genuine possibility, (and realistically so), it may result in strong  (and sustainable) motivation. We will say a bit more about this when we deal with the fourth dimension, time.

In brief, the growing participator is an ever emerging “new me” in the experience of the host people who interact with him/her, and who they take that “me” to be will impact participation and growth.

Next dimension please: Languaculture learning is cognitive.

Now we focus more strongly on the “langua-” in “languaculture”. We want to say that every bit of languaculture participation/learning/development is both (or at least, ideally, should both) sociocultural and cognitive. That is the point of the geometrical metaphor, in which we say that the sociocultural and the cognitive are two dimensions (with an ordinate and abscissa, such that every point on this two-dimensional plane of growing participation is located simultaneously on both dimensions, at some single point x,y.) For the non-mathematician reader, the sociocultural and the cognitive are not separate components or separate aspects or features of “language and culture learning,” but rather all of language learning is always both (at least ideally).

For our understanding of the cognitive dimension we draw from the field of psycholinguistics. (Psycholinguists study the cognitive processes of language comprehension and production, as well as child language acquisition and language pathology.)

Enormous progress has been made since the mid-20^th Century in understanding the nature of language comprehension and production. The human brain handles these great challenges so exquisitely that, like all of creation, the phenomena appear to be miraculous! One’s own brain uses well-established processes in comprehending and producing one’s native language (L1), and initially these same L1 comprehension and production processes are all there is for processing the new language (L2). Over time, with massive experience hearing, understanding and producing speech in the L2 (especially in face-to-face interaction), new cognitive processes develop that work adequately for the new language (perhaps aided by other cognitive strategies that aren’t needed as much in the highly successful and efficient processes of L1 comprehension and producton).

Language comprehension, or understanding speech

Language comprehension works from the sounds of speech, on through many “steps.” to ultimately create mental models of what the speaker is assumed by the hearer to mean. Initially, the new GP is confronted with a “wall of noise”. His/her listening system is in a massive state of mismatch with what s/he is hearing, even on the level of raw sound, and the mismatch continues at the levels of words, syntax and discourse.

Hearing sound/sounds in a new languaculture

The raw sound of speech contains no vowels or consonants or words. Listeners’ brains use evidence, called acoustic cues, to arrive at a sense of vowels and consonants, and they also used a variety of cues to break the sound stream into words. These acoustic cues, are specific in nature to each language, and of course the set of words are too, along with the strategies that will work for breaking the speech stream into words. We are not aware of these challenges as we effortlessly understand speech within our native language, nor as our ears are assaulted by the wall of noise that is speech in an unfamiliar language.

The GPA recognises a slow process of tuning up to the sounds of host speech. Often, the initial experience of host speech can be described as “murkey” (see Sebastián-Gallés, 2004). Echoic memory is a brief and highly volatile type of memory for sound that is easily overwritten by hearing additional speech (which is one reason we insist everyone remain quiet during Phase 1 listening activities!) In order to let it play a role in our phonetic learning, we enforce a “silent phase” in our early techniques of the Six-Phase Programme, and we continue to include lots of techniqes that involve listening without talking.

Cutting the speech stream into words

Imagine you have a 20,000 word dictionary, and you must look up words in it at an average speed of five words per two seconds. That gives some picture of the challenge the brain faces in dealing with words, even after it has successfully isolated them phonetically from the sound stream of speech which they exhaustively make up (Jusczyk & Luce, 2002). As soon as a word has been “looked up” in the massive “mental lexicon,” a decision must be made nearly instantly whether to keep it. In the stream of speech are many “candidate” words that are irrelevant. For example, if you heard the previous sentence read aloud, the word char would be part of it: speech+are could be heard as spee char. It helps that there is no such word as “spee”, so that it couldn’t really be spee char. However, when you are just learning a language, you don’t know what is and is not a word. Also, if you hear English as a native hears it, then the “ch” sound in char is slightly different from that in speech are (the “onset of voicing” is a few milliseconds later in the cha of char than in the cha in speech are). In fact, the host person hears a variety of such highly subtle phonetic clues that help him/her to break the speech stream into words. Nevertheless, his or her brain needsto activate whatever candidate words it can spot in the speech stream,  before deciding which “candidates” fit or don’t fit with the possible meanings of the overall utterance.

Thus hearing bill will activate the male name Bill, and also the beak-of-birds meaning, and the proposed-law-in-parliament meaning. If a foreigner is to process English words in rapid speech, s/he too needs to be able to activate every possible word, and then hang onto the ones that fit together with the likely meaning of the utterance. However matters may be worse for the foreigner, since the English bill may sound the same to him/her as bell and bear and beer. I kid you not! (Sebastián-Gallés, 2004). Thus, besides activating the three homonyms for bill that we mentioned, these other candidates—bell, bear, beer—may also be activated (along with their homonyms, and other words that sound similar to them and perhaps also some words that sound like bill in their L1).

Everything about the mental processing (comprehension and production) of words (and all other aspects of language) is highly sensitive to frequency (Ellis, 2002). Developing a powerful mental “word processor” for a new languaculture will be a matter of massive enough experience with the language so that word frequency can play its normal role, along with the roles it plays in dealing with word collocations (combinations)— we frequently combine heavy with traffic in English, but not with crowd. “There was heavy traffic down town” but not “There was a heavy crowd on the downtown mall.” And again, the frequency of what one hears—hence the experience of hearing and understanding massive amounts of speech—plays an important role at all levels of the processes of comprehension and production of speech. What you do a lot gets easier!

Knowing enough words

Adolphs and Schmitt (2002) showed us that good comprehension of English speech requires a listening vocabulary of many thousands of words—easily over 10,000. The GPA places major emphasis on developing a massive comprehension vocabulary, and suggests that GPs follow the Iceberg Principle: don’t try to memorise ten or fifteen thousand words. Rather, have strong encounters with new words, paying simultaneous attention to sound, meaning and context, and then subsequently you will re-encounter those words in proportion to their frequency in speech. They will eventually rise to the tip of the iceberg, available for use in spoken production. In other words, applying the Iceberg Principle includes encountering a massive amount of understandable speech over a long period of time. (This process can be strengthened by making special vocabulary-related recordings.)

Getting beyond the words: letting the grammar bits do their magic

Once words are recognised, as we have already said (following Gee, 1999), they function as cues to cultural models, which are activated and used in comprehension. We understand grammar to consist in a powerful set of processing cues (McWhinney, 1987) that enable the brain to organise the words into a “thought”.

There are sub-parts of words, and the variable forms of words (inflectional forms), and special grammatical words (function words) which work together with the grammatical cues of word order, rhythm, intonation, etc., to yield the meaning of utterances.

Sentence 1) below illustrates how grammatical elements are needed to create coherent “thoughts” from “content words” (nouns, verbs, adjectives adverbs). It was created by replacing grammar bits of a normal sentence with bits of nonsense (The grammatical cue of word order is still presevered, though, without which matters would be far worse.):

1) Blonk humid foov litch live-lar crabf flus crawl foov wiggle shoke litch pool.

This hardly sounds like a sentence. However, if we replace each nonsense word with a grammatical cue of some sort, and then replace the “content words” with  nonsense words, we get Lewis Carol’s sentence:

2) ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

Do you get the difference between these two sentences? They could both be derived from

3) ’Twas humid and the lively crabs did crawl and wiggle in the pool.

by replacing functional bits or meaningful bits with bits of meaningless sound. Replacing grammar cues with bits of nonsense leaves us without a sentence. We’d do much better if the grammar bits were just omitted altogether:

4) Humid live crab crawl wiggle pool.

By contrast, the grammar bits without the content words—’twas, and, -y, -s, did, and, in the, (prepositions like in can be considered intermediate between grammatical words and content words), as in Lewis Carroll’s example, do something very powerful for the native reader/listener. Children hearing that Carroll sentence have been known to draw a picture to depict its meaning! For a native listener, the grammar bits are terribly alive and active and powerful, triggering rapid organisation of words into “thought”.

Unfortunately for the new GP, most of those grammar bits are just plain dead as a door nail for a long, long time, just as surely as blonk, foov, litch, etc. were dead for native English readers just a moment ago. It matters not that the GP supposedly knows the grammar bits from hearing lectures about them. They are dead. They don’t trigger the kind of lively processes that they trigger in native listeners (Thomson 2000). We hope that the GP will have massive enough experiences hearing and understanding English, until a sentence like 2) will indeed spring to life for the GP as it does for the native listerner. It won’t happen over night, or even in a year or two.

Getting beyond the words: grouping them into phrases, clauses, sentences

The native listener’s brain not only reacts powerfully to grammatical bits, using them to organise words into “thoughts”, but it also carries out a process of grouping words into phrases, grouping phrases into clauses, and grouping clauses into sentences. This is the process psycholinguists call parsing. Linguist John Kimball gave us the famous example (Kimball, 1973):

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Your problem in reading that sentence, if English is your native language, is that the moment you hear, “The horse raced” your mental parser decides that horse is the subject, and raced is an intransitive predicate. However, there is another way to group the words, according to which the meaning is equivalent to the meaning of

The horse that was raced past the bar fell.

If the native listener has reason to do so, s/he can group the words of Kimball’s original sentence so that they mean just that.

Well, the brain appears to make extremely rapid decisions regarding how to group words into phrases, and those “instant” decisions can give us the wrong result, so that when the listener reaches the word “barn,” his/her brain thinks the sentence is finished, with the result that the word “fell” can’t be fit into the “thought”, but instead just hangs there doing nothing.

In the GPA we acknowledge that just as each language has its own way of recognising sounds and words, so each language has its own way of grouping words into phrases “instantly”. The new growing participator has only the word-grouping (parsing) system of his/her native language to employ in grouping words in the new language. Some aspects of the L1 system of word grouping may work for the L2, but others may not. Perhaps most will not.

Getting beyond the words: filling in massive missing detail

Finally, comprehension processes beyond the word include inferencing. We saw an example with the two sentences about the spilt coffee. The nature of the “coffee” in question (liquid beverage vs. grounds) was determined inferentially, drawing on the cultural model of coffee (basically, all that we know about coffee in our languaculture, from the bushes and beans to the grounds and beverages). The native ability to understand speech, depends constantly on the ability to make the right inferences, drawing on the cultural models of the host languaculture. Until the GP has a lot of familiarity with host cultural models of everyday life, the ability to draw the inferences crucial for understanding will be limited. In this respect too, the solution is massive experience with host discourse, which will grow from the relatively simple ones that are understood in the early weeks, to the highly complex ones in later months and years.

There are also inferences that help us to understand, for example, that someone who asks, “Do you feel cold?” is actually requesting that you close the window. The level and style of such “indirectness” in speech will vary from languaculture to languaculture (this is the area called pragmatics).

In spite of the limitations in the ability of GPs to draw the “instant” inferences required for good comprehension, we can imagine that GPs make lots of inferences as they listen, since even meanings expressed simply for host listeners may be understood at best with the help of “guessing” by the GP listener!

Taking comprehension seriously

In short, the GPA recognises that comprehension processes are enormously complex and vary greatly in nature from language to language. We expect great challenges in learning to understand rapid, native-to-native speech., starting with the challenge of hearing the sounds, where we miss hearing some sounds altogether, and mishear others (Sebastián-Gallés, 2004), and continuing on through the challenges of finding words in the speech stream, making use of grammatical cues, grouping words into phrases, and making essential inferences. The fact that the GPA sees such a challenge in learning to understand speech leads to major elements of the design of the Six-Phase Program. The emphasis on comprehension ahead of speaking also relates to our GPA values in the sociocultural dimension: host people need to be listened to. We don’t participate in a people group with an overwhelming focus on what we want to say, but rather with a passion to hear the thoughts and hearts of host people in order to converse with them rather than talk at them.

Talking is important, too!

Speech production, like speech comprehension is a many-“step” process (Kormos, 2006), with many of the steps happening “ballistically”, that is, so automatically and powerfully that once they are underway, the speaker has no control over them, until s/he has heard what s/he just said, at which point s/he may wish to make corrections. The ballistic nature of speech production results in lots of misfires as when someone accidentally says, “She hook my shand” in place of the intended “She shook my hand”. Such speech errors have provided researchers with abundant evidence regarding the process of speech production, since different kinds of errors reflect different “steps” or levels in the process. There is now also a large body of experimental literature and neuro-imaging research related to how people produce speech. In the major models, the production of an utterance begins at a “message level” without words (though perhaps influenced already by what is readily sayable given the grammatical and lexical inclinations of the language—See Slobin, 1994), and goes on through steps that include the selection of appropriate words, the placing of them into their positions and finally the physical speaking of them.

In the case of comprehension, if the GP fails to make use of some grammar bits in the listening process, host people will not be aware of it. When the GP speaks, as well, there will be many ways in which his/her speech is not host-like in its use of those grammar bits. Unlike the case of listening, this will be overwhelmingly obvious to the host people who hear the GP talking.

For the GP involved in his/her early speaking efforts, however, the luxury of sounding host-like doesn’t come to mind when s/he is struggling mightily to get some of his/her point across, period! As with the comprehension system, at the outset of growing participation, the only production system the GP has is that of his/her native language (and possibly adaptations of it for other languages s/he has been learning). In a whole host of ways, that system doesn’t work smoothly, or doesn’t work at all for the new language. The struggle that the GP goes through in producing speech is often discussed under the heading of “communication strategies” (Kormos, 2006).

The GPA includes the talk-a-lot principle, which highly motivated growing participators seem to know instinctively, although if they are cognitively oriented, they may see it in terms of needing to “practice speaking/” rather than a need to participate in the right kind of relationships enough of the time. Be that as it may, as we talk a lot, talking becomes easier— easier for the GP to produce and easier for host people to understand. Having struggled and succeeded to express “an idea” in the past, expressing the same or similar “ideas” in the future should be easier.

Therefore, in the GPA, combining the sociocultural and cognitive dimensions we are led to suspect that the most powerful cause of growth in speaking ability is fostered by conversational interaction with host people who meet us in our growth zone. For one thing, as the GP struggles, a sympathetic host person in his/her growth zone steps in and helps out, and success results. The next time a similar communication need arises, the struggle will be less than it was the first time.

There is another factor, though, which may make interpersonal interaction especially powerful in fostering growth. That has to do with characteristics of conversational interaction that have been called coordination in dialogue, alignment, convergence, syntactic priming, and structural repetition. Some of expressions sound more cognitive, and others more sociocultural. The idea is that in a conversation between two native users of the language, the grammatical forms and choices of words and phraseology that are used by either of the two conversational partners (interlocutors) strongly influence those used by the other conversational partner. We know that this is the case when you and I are carrying on a conversation as two natives conversing in our shared native language. There is also evidence that the same force is at work when we interact conversationally in our new language (Atkinson, et al., 2007; Costa, Pickering & Sorace, 2008; McDonough & Mackey, 2008). In conversational interaction, something in us conforms increasingly to the speech of the host person with whom we are conversing. This cognitive fact harmonises nicely with the general sociocultural understanding of learning in general: learning is not first and foremost a private, individual inner affair, but rather a public, observable, interpersonal affair, with the social/observable activity secondarily being privatised and internalised over time.

Getting the grammatical form of our speech to sound more host-like

There is a widespread view that to learn to speak, one needs to be “taught the grammar” and then “practice using it”. In the GPA we encourage activities which raise the GP’s awareness of grammatical form, and his/her understanding of the meanings of grammatical forms, but this is not necessarily accompanied by abstract discussion of grammar in technical language. We observe that many people have “grammar anxiety.” Yet we find that we can often “disguise the grammar” as meaning, letting people get the point of many grammatical forms without discussing them in academic terms. When told, “The plural suffix in Kazakh has six forms, governed by vowel harmony and consonant assimilation,” people with “grammar anxiety” may become paralysed. However, we find that in practice, there is just no need to inform them of such “facts”! As aids to increasing awareness of grammatical form without forcing people to learn technical grammatical terminology and abstract analyses, we recommend “structured input” techniques (VanPatten, 2007) and “input floods” (Trahey & White, 1993), many of which are built into the Phase 1 techniques of the Six-Phase Programme, and also “output floods”. We approach such techniques as examples of language play. In the case of Kazakh plural suffixes people learn these “games,” have fun doing so and end up producing the right forms, which they may or may not have consciously analysed to one degree or another.

In any case, we feel that awareness of grammatical form can’t hurt anything, and it may be of some help, for example, contributing to communication strategies such as advance planning of utterances. However, when it comes to L2 speech production, no amount of grammar study and drills are a substitute for extensive face-to-face social interaction and other experiences in understanding speech, leading to a high level of familiarity with how host people talk. We also recognise that matters such as word choice, idioms and appropriateness are more important than host-sounding grammatical form in terms of helping GPs to sound more like “one of us” to host people.

In the end (and well before that!) the most noble effort to lead L2 learners into host-sounding grammatical speech will often fail. Teachers can teach grammar points until they are blue in the face and students can understand them and pass tests about them, but when they get down to talking for real, it seems that no matter what the student’s mind wants, the student’s brain has a mind of its own, and keeps getting things wrong! Too often people talk of the importance of “good grammar” in moralistic terms. Too often, the learning of a particular language is made to appear to be a feat of great intellectual prowess rather than growing participation in a live, personal, languacultural world. One important feature of the GPA is that we expect people to end up sounding non-host-like in various ways.  However much we may impress ourselves or one another as workers, the host people are less impressed with us than we imagine!

The long and the short of it:

Picture humanity as being partitioned into groups which are separated from one another by walls—walls of noise. We say that what is a wall of noise—the sound of the speech that is heard but not understood—is only a wall to the outsider. For the host people, the same sound of speech is an invisible window into one another’s minds and hearts. They notice the ideas being expressed, not the sound that is being used.  Some of the reasons for the difficulty “penetrating” that wall of noise, turning the wall into a window, should be evident from our discussion of the difficulty of hearing and understanding speech.

People groups in general are isolated from one another by the walls of noise. They can still see one another’s actions, but what they see is an illusion,  given that they can only see those actions in terms of their own  “they stories” about them, while the host people are carrying on a very different lived-story.

Enter the would-be GP. At the outset s/he is a nobody within the host languacultural world apart from being identified with the stereotype of his/her particular brand of foreigner (and host people unknowingly tell their own “they stories” about him/her). If s/he understands and follows the GPA, then s/he looks at the people behind the wall of noise and realises that there is a story going on in there that s/he knows nothing about. S/he wants to cross the wall of noise, and participate in the story that those people are living, rather than just continuing to tell him/her own home-languacultural “they story” about “them”. S/he wants to be part of the shared life of those people, and even make his/her contribution with them to their process of extending their story to the next level of their history.

As times goes on, this one-time “nobody” emerges as a “new me” before the eyes of his/her host nurturers and other host people. S/he steadily becomes easier to deal with, less and less weird, so that dealing with him/her becomes more and more rewarding for a growing variety of host people, meaning that more and more host people interact with her in her growth zone, and she grows and grows.

In the first moments of growing participation, the GP cannot understand anything or say anything, but the nurturer begins helping the GP to take his/her first baby steps into that new world by playing with him/her in ways that allow him/her to learn and grow. We mentioned earlier how that the GP initially attaches the host-word “handles” (phonetic form) to his/her native-word “tool heads” (the conceptual part of each word). Gradually, with massive participation in host discourses, those “tool heads” (word concepts) become more like those of the host people.

The Time Dimension                              

It is often taken for granted that “learning a language and culture” takes time. However, time is too important a dimension to take for granted. In the GPA, we think about it a lot.

Our different lives/worlds/lived-stories compete for our finite time

A GP moves physically to where host people live. However, he is still living his home life at the moment of arrival, in spite of being physically among host people. This is also the case for tourists and world-travel addicts.

Imagine an Anglo-Canadian experiencing Uganda, Thailand, France, Turkey, Russia, etc. The story he is living is certainly not a Ugandan, Thai, French, Turkish, Russian, etc. story. Rather the experience in each land are part of his personal Canadian story, constructed using the Anglo-Canadian mediational means (story-constructing pieces) and drawing on the cultural models of his Anglo-Canadian home languacultural world. The Canadian’s lived-story moves in and out of Canada, and in Uganda, it is an Anglo-Canadian story/experience of Uganda, not a Ugandan experience of Uganda.

The point of growing participation is to stop making “them” part of my home languacultural story and begin living in their story with them. But my changeover from my story to theirs is gradual. Not that I stop living my Canadian story in my Canadian languacultural world, but increasingly I live the host story in the host languacultural world.

Even after I’ve grown a great distance into my participation in the host languacultural world, my Canadian languacultural life may still dominate. We aren’t saying that should or should not be the case. In my flat with my Canadian wife and children, I will likely be primarily dwelling in a little, insulated Canadian bubble (less so if host people are visiting me constantly there). But my Canadian or wider Anglophone life (including Brits, Australians, etc.) doesn’t end at my own walls. I may also have a network of people from Anglophone countries with whom I carry on an active social life that occupies many hours per week, including travel time to be with them. I may also have North American satellite television, a library of American DVDs, and I may spend a lot of time reading in English, both professionally and for leisure, as well as browsing American websites. My kids may be going to a school for the children of expats that may also be an Anglophone world. All of these examples are elements of my home world in the host country, and together they give me a rich and pervasive “home life” (“home” is intended as the antonym of “host”) in my host country. This vigourous “home” languacultural life in the host country is what I will call my “home-away-from-home life.” That is a tremendously important concept, and that life probably gets a bigger slice of time than my other lives.

Now I may be not an Anglo-Canadian, but a Korean or German abroad. I am likely to be carrying on a Korean or German home-away-from-home life in the host country. But unlike the Anglo-Canadian, who has only two lives to contend with, two lives to compete with one another, as a Korean or German, I have three languacultural worlds going on in the host country: 1) My Korean or German home-away-from-home life, 2) my life of growing participation in the international-expat-Anglo-worker community, and 3) my life in the local host languacultural world.  Three worlds, each competing for my time! Any time that I spend in one of these three l lives is time I don’t spend in the other two. All too often, it is the third life, the local host languacultural life, that gets the smallest share of time, perhaps not even enough time to have real viability. I may describe the problem by saying, “My language learning is not going well”, but I need to be told, “It is not a language to be learned, but a life to be lived”.

Time alone is not enough

However, it is not purely a matter of the quantity of time, but also of the quality. I may spend many hours per day around host people, but I am not understanding much of what they say, nor conversing much myself. Or I may be relating heavily to local people, but in English (or some other language I share with them besides their heart language). I mustn’t take comfort in the mere fact that I am with host people a lot. What really counts is

the amount of time during which people interact with me in my growth zone in their languacultural world.

If that is happening for at least fifteen hours a week, I can grow reasonably steadily.

How will it happen? Most likely, for many months people will only interact with me in my growth zone for that many hours per week if I pay them for it! As I become easier and more enjoyable to communicate with, it will happen more and more without payment, in the course of life. (We’ll talk about making our workplace a host community of practice. However, in the early months, making my workplace a host community of practice may still not mean that people in my workplace are spending a lot of time with me in my growth zone, and so I am likely to need to recruit a special nurturer and pay him/her.)

How much time is enough? 100 hours; 300 hours; seventeen years

In order to help people to be realistic about the time needed to change, we adopt an observation of Betty Lou Leaver (2003b), based on her exceptionally vast experience learning languages and observing language learners in detail:

"The diagnostic assessment can be repeated periodically, but consider that for proficiency to make any noticeable gain at all, the typical person needs at least 100 hours of additional language exposure and practice to make noticeable gains at lower levels of proficiency and at least 300 hours at higher levels." (p. 28)

Thus we tell people, “100 hours to a new you” (if they have limited ability so far) or “300 hours to a new you” (if they seem to have at least basic conversational ability). The idea of “a new you” is in line with the “self-system” approach to motivation referred to earlier. Do I want to become someone I currently am not in terms of the “me” that host people experience? I can schedule, say, three hundred hours of techniques optimal to my current ability level (and 300 hours will also mean at least 2250 new words in my iceberg, significantly increased familiarity with how people talk, and countless successfully produced utterances under my belt that will make many future efforts a lot easier). We believe having such a “possible” goal (say, 300 hours of concretely specified activities) involving a highly desirable “new me” could be powerfully motivating, while not reinforcing false hopes that a big change can occur in, say, ten hours.

Another tidbit we draw from Betty Lou Leaver is the figure already mentioned of of seventeen years. In her research, she located over fifty people who had been officially rated as ILR Level 4, so-called “near native,” having begun learning the other language as adults. She found that the average time it took for adults to grow to Level 4 was seventeen years! She claims that with the right strategy, that average can be reduced to six years, but that is still just an average (and she doesn’t suggest a range).

The time dimension and metamorphosing techniques

The reason for hiring a nurturer is that at lower stages of our growth, life out in the big host world provides only  snatches of time during which people interact with us in our growth zone, maybe a few minutes out of many hours around host people. With a hired nurturer, most of those many hours can involve co-participation in life with a host person meeting us in our growth zone. It’s like supercharging our time with host people for maximum participation. Thus we often refer to the techniques in the Six-Phase Programme as “supercharged participation activities”.

The time dimension was originally conceptualised first and foremost in recognition that the nature of one’s “language learning activities” (one’s choice of supercharged participation techniques) needs to evolve steadily (as in the Six-Phase Programme), so that one’s current techniques look radically different from those of six months ago (or in the early days, from those of three months ago, a month ago, even two weeks ago—they change most rapidly at first, and more slowly as time goes on). This understanding of the time dimension is behind the design of the Six-Phase Programme. However, we conceptualise the six phases not just in terms of metamorphosing supercharged participation techniques, but also with a view to our personal changes in the social and  cognitive dimensions.

Socioculturally, who we are (our identity)—in terms of the way host people experience us—keeps changing, and the variety of people who interact with us in our growth zone, and how much they interact with us, keeps changing.

Cognitively, our ability to hear speech in a host-like way, and our other processes for understanding and producing speech keep changing.

References

Adolphs, Svenja & Schmitt, Norbert. (2003). Lexical coverage of spoken discourse. Applied Linguistics 24, pp. 425-438.

Agar, Michael. (1995) Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation, New York, Wm. Morrow.

Anthony, Edward E.V. (1963). Approach, method and technique. English Langauge Teaching, vol. 17, pp. 63-67.

Benson, Phil, & Lor, Winnie (1999). Conceptions of language and language learning. System, 27, pp. 459-72.

Bruner, Jerome S. (1990) Acts of Meaning. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bygate, Martin. 1996. Effects of task repetition: appraising learners' performances on tasks. In Willis,D. & J.Willis Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Pp. 136-46. London: Heinemann.

Costa, Albert;  Pickering, Martin J. & Sorace, Antonella. (2008). Alignment in second language dialogue. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, pp. 528-556.

Dörnyei, Zoltán. (2005). The Psychology of the Language Learner. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Ellis, Nick C. (2002). Frequency effects in language processing. SSLA  24, pp. 143-188.

Gee, James Paul. (1999) Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge.

Jusczyk,  Peter W. & Luce,  Paul A. (2002) Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition: Past and Present. Ear & Hearing, 23, pp. 2-40.

Kimball, J. P. (1973). Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 2, 15–48.

Kormos, Judit. (2006). Speech Production and Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Lave, Jean, & Wenger, Etienne. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Leaver, Betty Lou. (2003a). Achieving Native-Like Second Language Proficiency. Hollister, Calif.: MSI Press.

Leaver, Betty Lou. (2003b). Individualised Study Plans for Very Advanced Students of Foreign Languages. Hollister, Calif.: MSI Press.

MacWhinney, B. (1987). The competition model. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition (pp. 249–308). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

McDonough,  Kim & Mackey, Alison. (2008).  Syntactic priming and esl question development. SSLA, 30, pp. 31–47.

Miller, Laura & Ginsberg, Ralph B. (1995). Folklinguistic Theories of Language Learning. In Freed, Barbara F. Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context. Benjamins. Pp. 293-315.

Norton, Bonnie. (2000). Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity and Educational Change. London: Longman.Atkinson, Dwight; Churchill, Eton; Takako Nishino& Okada, Hanako. (2007). Alignment and Interaction in a Sociocognitive Appr oach to Second Language Acquisition. Modern Language Journal, 91, pp. 169-188.

Sebastián-Gallés, Núria. (2004). Cross-Language Speech Perception. In Pisoni, David B. & Remez, Robert E. The Handbook of Speech Perception, pp. 531-546. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sfard, Anna. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27, pp. 4-13.

Slobin, Dan I. (1994). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking.” In Gumperz, John J. & Levinson, Stephen C. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, pp. 70-96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomson, Greg. (2000). Second Language Acquisition and Comprehension Mechanisms: the Problem of Russian Inflectional Morphology. University of Alberta doctoral dissertation.

Trahey, M. & White, Lydia. (1993). Positive evidence and preemption in the second language classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 15, pp. 181-204.

VanPatten, Bill. (2007). Input processing in adult second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 115–136). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.

Wenger, Etienne. (1998). Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Wertsch, James V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Appendix: The Six Phase Programme

Resources available at http://tinyurl.com/growingparticipators

Phase 1: The Here-and-Now Phase

100 Hours (three to six weeks). Nurturer helps us grow by playing with us. We learn to understand about 800 words, and many grammar structures through input flooding. We tune up to the language and begin speaking. We can understand complex speech about the here-and-now, along with survival expressions. Speaking is quite a struggle for us! When it comes to meaningful relationships in the host world (as opposed to host people meeting us in our own world) it is mainly just our hired nurturer. By the end of this phase our ability is something like FSI Level 0+

Phase 2: Story-Building Phase

150 Hours. Using wordless picture stories (possibly other visible props) we greatly increase our ability to talk and understand. Though our talking still works best in the here-and-now mode, we are understanding lengthy narratives when we have set ourselves up for them through personal interaction in the host language supported by picture stories. Our relationship with our nurturer is getting surprisingly deep already, and we may carry on a few other relationships, but still with difficulty. We add another 1200 words to our listening vocabulary, and participate in many public situations in local life. By the end of this phase we are roughly comparable to FSI Level 1.

Phase 3: Shared-Story Phase

250 hours. Hearing and discussing “world stories” (also called “bridge stories”) such as Cinderella or other widely available stories. Engaging in shared experiences with our nurturer(s), and reminiscing together later. Talking in detail about the common public experiences mentioned above under Phase 2. Starting to understand expository language. Basic conversational ability—can carry on conversations on a growing variety of topics. Can tell simple stories. Thus, friendships with several people can be going relatively deep. In ILR terms, we like to compare ourselves to Level 1+ or Level 2 by the end of this phase.

Phase 4: Deep-Life-Sharing Phase

500 hours. Life-story interviewing, walk-of-life interviewing, interviewing about detailed observations of local social situations, letting us discover more about the meanings host people bring to their world in order to understanding it, building “epic stories” day-by-day (by co-construction and task repetition rather than memorisation) with a number of friends. Bonding deeply with a number of people. Lots of conversational ability, and ability to narrate with increasing richness. Able to produce some expository discourse. People share their hearts with us and we with them. In ILR terms, we like to compare ourselves to Level 2+.

Phase 5: Native-to-Native Discourses Phase

500 hours. Understanding much of what host people say to one another (in contrast with what they address to us personally) is still a great challenge. In this phase we “massage” a large volume of recorded, native-to-native speech, figuring out what is preventing us from understanding those parts that we can’t understand. We are able not only to have deep relationships, but also to participate in host communities of practice, for example, an aerobics club or a study group, and in those groups being taken as “more or less one of us”. In ILR terms, we may not yet be Level 3 by the end of Phase 5, but we have a powerful secret: we are understanding most of what we hear people say. Thus we can’t stop growing as long as we are involved with people.

Phase 6: Self-sustaining growth

The last sentence under Phase 5 defines this phase. We continue walking the walk and talking the talk, and growing the growth, never forgetting that “it’s not a language to be learned, but a life to be lived.”