We're away from Pakistan for a couple of weeks, and using recordings to relive our supercharged participation experiences for awhile most days. This experience so reminds me that I am not me. Rather, we are we! The processes of experiencing, registering, recognising, understanding, recalling, and strengthening are processes of a "we" not an "I". I used to emphasise this fact a lot more. I need to get back to doing that more. "Language" (now I prefer to say, talking, understanding, conversing) is a about "we-s"and not about "I-s". Clapping is not about a single hand! As we relive these experiences with our nurturer, far away from him, he is also here with us, not only in the recordings, but in our own inner and outer voices whenever we attempt to say something to one another in Potwari. I'm mentioning this, because Angela has been getting busier and just now I was listening alone. Weird. Yet, even now, I wasn't listening as an I, but three voices going on, in me and out of me, working together for understanding and growing. But it works so much better, for her and for me, when there are two of us physically together, and much, much better with there are three of us--she, I and the nurturer as the current evolving "we". (Others will join this "we".)
Monday, February 25, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Starting Phase 2 with Lexicarry
The Guide to Phase 2 (The Next 150 Hours) is based around Mercer Mayer's book Frog Where Are You? We chose that book because we felt it is more likely to stay in print than most wordless picture story books . We've bought and given away scores of copies of the book along with the Guide to Phase 2.
However, Angela and I just started Phase 2 differently. In the Guide to Phase 2, we talk briefly about Story Building using the Lexicarry by Patrick Moran. (see http://www.lexicarry.com) For Phase 1, Angela has made the "Lexicarry-like" pictures that are in the graphics packet. They include some greetings, but more emphasis on "power tools" such as "What is that? I don't know. What am I doing? I don't understand. Please speak more slowly. What did you say? What is this called?" (We make up new ones on the fly). So we in fact didn't use the Lexicarry at all in Phase 1, only our "Lexicary-like" pictures. It turned out that we had only five hours to get into Phase 2 before leaving the country for a couple weeks, and decided, why not do it with Lexicarry? And so we did.
A drawback of Lexicarry for early Phase 2 is that, unlike the pages of wordless picture story books, the story strips of Lexicarry aren't full of background and foreground details to talk about. For this and other reasons, if someone doesn't already "know the ropes" of doing Story Building in Phase 2, we suggest that they indeed start with Frog Where Are You? and carefully read the Guide to Phase 2 in order to learn the technique. Once they have the technique down pat, they'll have flexibility in varying it.
So how did it go using Lexicarry rather than a wordless picture story book? Wee, even without all the little background and foreground details of Frog Where Are You? we nevertheless came close to meeting our goals of seven or eight new words per hour, on average. In those five hours we did 9 Lexicarry strips with a range of 3 to 9 new words per strip.
The steps we followed were similar to those we use with picture story books, but treating a frame in a Lexicarry story strip as if it were a page in the book. So the basic steps were:
1) Look at a frame, and try to say what is there and what is happening.
•GP's in the lead.
•Nurturer scaffolds their efforts to talk.
•GP's look for everything they can say.
•They look for things they can't say, and ask the nurturer.
2) Write numbers by bits of the story that represent new words; record the new words in the order of those numbers as that auditory dictionary.
3) Word strengthening activity (nurturer speaks, and we point or act out in some way).
4) Summary recording of each frame as we finish it
5) Debrief after an appropriate amount of monolingual time
6) Go on to the next frame and repeat 1 through 5 with that frame
7) After doing steps 1- 5 with the final frame of a story strip, nurturer tells whole the story in the "past tense"
•First re-play the frame-by-frame summaries for the nurturer to be reminded of things to say.
•The nurturer tells the story while looking at the picture strip. (Recorded)
•The nurturer re-tells the story with the picture book closed. (Recorded)
As you can see, Lexicarry seems to work much like a wordless picture story book, although we covered twenty-seven frames in five hours, and we wouldn't want to cover twenty-seven wordless picture story book pages that quickly.
An advantage of the Lexicarry picture strips is the carefully planned range of human interactions that are depicted. In building stories about those interactions, we tried to think of issues such as who would speak first of the two people? What else might they say? In which situations would a particular speech act be carried out in the same way or different ways (say someone in a picture strip is saying that they are sorry in a particular way for a particular reason)? Other meaningful details, such as why the beggar is holding out his left hand to receive money? Etc. So our asking could go beyond the old fashioned "What is that?" and "What is he doing?" though there was a reasonable amount of that old fashioned asking as well.
Now we're away for a couple of weeks, with lots of recordings that let us re-live, re-experience, refresh and strengthen!
However, Angela and I just started Phase 2 differently. In the Guide to Phase 2, we talk briefly about Story Building using the Lexicarry by Patrick Moran. (see http://www.lexicarry.com) For Phase 1, Angela has made the "Lexicarry-like" pictures that are in the graphics packet. They include some greetings, but more emphasis on "power tools" such as "What is that? I don't know. What am I doing? I don't understand. Please speak more slowly. What did you say? What is this called?" (We make up new ones on the fly). So we in fact didn't use the Lexicarry at all in Phase 1, only our "Lexicary-like" pictures. It turned out that we had only five hours to get into Phase 2 before leaving the country for a couple weeks, and decided, why not do it with Lexicarry? And so we did.
A drawback of Lexicarry for early Phase 2 is that, unlike the pages of wordless picture story books, the story strips of Lexicarry aren't full of background and foreground details to talk about. For this and other reasons, if someone doesn't already "know the ropes" of doing Story Building in Phase 2, we suggest that they indeed start with Frog Where Are You? and carefully read the Guide to Phase 2 in order to learn the technique. Once they have the technique down pat, they'll have flexibility in varying it.
So how did it go using Lexicarry rather than a wordless picture story book? Wee, even without all the little background and foreground details of Frog Where Are You? we nevertheless came close to meeting our goals of seven or eight new words per hour, on average. In those five hours we did 9 Lexicarry strips with a range of 3 to 9 new words per strip.
The steps we followed were similar to those we use with picture story books, but treating a frame in a Lexicarry story strip as if it were a page in the book. So the basic steps were:
1) Look at a frame, and try to say what is there and what is happening.
•GP's in the lead.
•Nurturer scaffolds their efforts to talk.
•GP's look for everything they can say.
•They look for things they can't say, and ask the nurturer.
2) Write numbers by bits of the story that represent new words; record the new words in the order of those numbers as that auditory dictionary.
3) Word strengthening activity (nurturer speaks, and we point or act out in some way).
4) Summary recording of each frame as we finish it
5) Debrief after an appropriate amount of monolingual time
6) Go on to the next frame and repeat 1 through 5 with that frame
7) After doing steps 1- 5 with the final frame of a story strip, nurturer tells whole the story in the "past tense"
•First re-play the frame-by-frame summaries for the nurturer to be reminded of things to say.
•The nurturer tells the story while looking at the picture strip. (Recorded)
•The nurturer re-tells the story with the picture book closed. (Recorded)
As you can see, Lexicarry seems to work much like a wordless picture story book, although we covered twenty-seven frames in five hours, and we wouldn't want to cover twenty-seven wordless picture story book pages that quickly.
An advantage of the Lexicarry picture strips is the carefully planned range of human interactions that are depicted. In building stories about those interactions, we tried to think of issues such as who would speak first of the two people? What else might they say? In which situations would a particular speech act be carried out in the same way or different ways (say someone in a picture strip is saying that they are sorry in a particular way for a particular reason)? Other meaningful details, such as why the beggar is holding out his left hand to receive money? Etc. So our asking could go beyond the old fashioned "What is that?" and "What is he doing?" though there was a reasonable amount of that old fashioned asking as well.
Now we're away for a couple of weeks, with lots of recordings that let us re-live, re-experience, refresh and strengthen!
Friday, February 15, 2013
Nurturer training--subtleties of nurturing versus teaching
We can teach what nurturing is but there seems to be almost as big a challenge in teaching what it isn't. Besides that, I learned in Principles of Teaching 101 that you go from the known to the unknown. In many places the known is teaching, while the unknown is nurturing. However, the prejudice toward teaching rather than nurturing is so strong that even if we train nurturers to nurture, there is a moment-by-moment danger of backsliding. Suppose a nurture really gets the point, and never backslides. There are still that nurturer's GPs. If they haven't grasp the difference between nurturing and teaching, and the difference between students and GPs, then all we've done by training the nurturer is to put her at cross purposes with her GPs! Just as nurturers will vary in their inclination to backslide, so will GPs who basically understand the difference. Well, then, part of nurturer training is to teach them to deal with GPs who want to be students.
But the re-infiltration of the teacher-student mindset is a subtle tendency. If a GP has that teacher-student mindset, it is going to show up on unexpected ways. Of course, GPs are supposed to be a little community, a team growing together and helping one another in natural ways. Ever notice GPs getting angry at other GPs? I think it is because they are being students. And how dare a fellow-student act like she is a teacher! "The teacher is my teacher. Teachers are superior to students, as you know, and I resent your acting superior to me!" Time to front slide. Instead of "The teacher is my teacher, back to "The nurturer is our nurturer, and you & I are co-growing-participators, so enjoying helping one another along, as the nurturer helps us help one another."
But the re-infiltration of the teacher-student mindset is a subtle tendency. If a GP has that teacher-student mindset, it is going to show up on unexpected ways. Of course, GPs are supposed to be a little community, a team growing together and helping one another in natural ways. Ever notice GPs getting angry at other GPs? I think it is because they are being students. And how dare a fellow-student act like she is a teacher! "The teacher is my teacher. Teachers are superior to students, as you know, and I resent your acting superior to me!" Time to front slide. Instead of "The teacher is my teacher, back to "The nurturer is our nurturer, and you & I are co-growing-participators, so enjoying helping one another along, as the nurturer helps us help one another."
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Dipping into Potwari literacy practices
Potwaris, if they are literate at all--and I don't know the percentages, but it is a lot of them who are literate--are literate in Urdu. Almost no-one, by contrast, uses Potwari for reading and writing much at all. Literacy means Urdu.
Since we're being nurtured into Potwari practices, that includes--at the right time and in the right functions--being nurtured into Potwari literacy practices, i.e., their practices of reading and writing Urdu. Keeping the time dimension in view, it wouldn't make any sense to worry about this in Phase 1. If Potwaris were literate in Potwari then, as you know, we'd just learn the names of the letters, Dirty-Dozen style, in Phase 1. We say that the letters, like bottles and axes and pillows, are pieces of life in a literate languacultural word, piece of life with names (such as a, b, c...). But it turns out, it is Urdu letters that are pieces of Potwari life.
Since we already know some Urdu, though, there is nothing wrong with learning the names of the Urdu letters in Potwari. This was mainly for Angela. She learned to recognise the letters, in their word medial forms. It is a frustration for her, anyway, that she can't read Urdu. And since that is a Potwari practice, why not start taking it on? She has got her start on that now, in Potwari supercharged participation sessions, recognising how important Urdu letters and Urdu written texts are in Potwari life.
Since we're being nurtured into Potwari practices, that includes--at the right time and in the right functions--being nurtured into Potwari literacy practices, i.e., their practices of reading and writing Urdu. Keeping the time dimension in view, it wouldn't make any sense to worry about this in Phase 1. If Potwaris were literate in Potwari then, as you know, we'd just learn the names of the letters, Dirty-Dozen style, in Phase 1. We say that the letters, like bottles and axes and pillows, are pieces of life in a literate languacultural word, piece of life with names (such as a, b, c...). But it turns out, it is Urdu letters that are pieces of Potwari life.
Since we already know some Urdu, though, there is nothing wrong with learning the names of the Urdu letters in Potwari. This was mainly for Angela. She learned to recognise the letters, in their word medial forms. It is a frustration for her, anyway, that she can't read Urdu. And since that is a Potwari practice, why not start taking it on? She has got her start on that now, in Potwari supercharged participation sessions, recognising how important Urdu letters and Urdu written texts are in Potwari life.
Sound sorting tones
Two posts today. First, early on, we encountered two words: broom and window. Both sounded like baarii. However, we discovered they were different and the difference was categorical for the nurturer (which always seems dramatic when they hear something so strikingly different, and you don't hear any difference). Angela and I could not possibly hear any distinction. This is what Núria Sebastián-Gallés calls "deafness" in cross-language speech perception. (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.) To host people, the difference is so obvious and they can't fathom anyone not hearing it. They can't get in your shoes and hear through your ears. But truly, to you the two things sound identical. (A Latina woman told me once that she always says "bed linens" rather than "sheets" since she can hear no difference between "sheet" and another English word.
When we found ourselves deaf to a sound distinction, I at once concluded the difference must be tone, because all the other possibilities involved sound distinctions I know I'm not "deaf" to, and I'd already heard that a related language was tonal.
We'd been doing sound sorting with first-syllable vowels, but that was pretty easy. In Phase 1, we have small drawings for each earlier vocabulary item, and use them for different purposes, including sound sorting. If you've forgotten what sound sorting is, in the case of initial vowels, it means listening to the words again that go with the drawings, and as you do, arranging the drawings in columns of words that all begin with the same vowel. It was definitely helping us to hear the vowels better, but there were no distinctions we could not here.
When we discovered there were tones, and we were "deaf" to them, we took the picture of the broom and the one of the window as the headers for two columns, and then we stared trying to put other pictures into one column or the other based on whether they had the tone (pattern) of "broom" or "window" (and "broom" and "window" were also taken as the "names" of the two tones (patterns) so that the nurture could tell us for new words, which tone it was).
So we're sound-sorting words by tones.So far, not so good, but we believe it will get better. One problem is, of the two tones (patterns) one is not very common, so we have hardly any drawings in that column and a ten-foot-long vertical strip of little drawings in the other column. To make matters worse, we read now that there are three tones (patterns) in these languages. We thought we had an example of the third, but it turned out not to be so. Still looking.
We'll let you know if and when we overcome our "deafness"
When we found ourselves deaf to a sound distinction, I at once concluded the difference must be tone, because all the other possibilities involved sound distinctions I know I'm not "deaf" to, and I'd already heard that a related language was tonal.
We'd been doing sound sorting with first-syllable vowels, but that was pretty easy. In Phase 1, we have small drawings for each earlier vocabulary item, and use them for different purposes, including sound sorting. If you've forgotten what sound sorting is, in the case of initial vowels, it means listening to the words again that go with the drawings, and as you do, arranging the drawings in columns of words that all begin with the same vowel. It was definitely helping us to hear the vowels better, but there were no distinctions we could not here.
When we discovered there were tones, and we were "deaf" to them, we took the picture of the broom and the one of the window as the headers for two columns, and then we stared trying to put other pictures into one column or the other based on whether they had the tone (pattern) of "broom" or "window" (and "broom" and "window" were also taken as the "names" of the two tones (patterns) so that the nurture could tell us for new words, which tone it was).
So we're sound-sorting words by tones.So far, not so good, but we believe it will get better. One problem is, of the two tones (patterns) one is not very common, so we have hardly any drawings in that column and a ten-foot-long vertical strip of little drawings in the other column. To make matters worse, we read now that there are three tones (patterns) in these languages. We thought we had an example of the third, but it turned out not to be so. Still looking.
We'll let you know if and when we overcome our "deafness"
f
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Finished the First 100 Hours
I was thinking today, as we did Phase 1B session 25, how that so much has happened between us and our nurturer, and thus, in us, and including in our brains (language processing systems), and in "us-in-the-host-world", in spite of the fact that, in my case at least, I wasn't "trying" real hard. Just doing all the games (nee activities) and quite a bit distracted, but it worked. We're more than ready for Phase 2. We have some other things to do, though, for a couple of days, and then we'll be away for awhile.
One thing we noticed is that key concepts ("vocabulary") need to be added to the games. You recall that our Phase One activities are not too much about "useful expressions for the real world". Our supercharged participation sessions are part of the real, host world--the only part that is accessible enough for enough hours that we can grow much during this early stage. And as we play, we "conquer the world". That is, we want to start understanding speech, and then talking, about the basics of everyday experience, because that is what we will build on in Phase 2.
PEOPLE (man, woman, boy, girl)
Their bodies (body parts, possessive)
Their emotions and physical conditions
Their appearances
Names of their family relationships
Their most basic actions (run, walk, take, read, buy, sneeze, barf...)
ANIMALS (included early because of their place in discourse)
Household animals (if there is such a thing)
Farm animals
Wild animals
Creepy crawlies
HOUSE
Parts of of it
Contents of it
The OUTSIDE area where most outside daily business is done
The COUNTRYSIDE and it's contents
Natural features
Agricultural features
Maybe salient countries
PROPERTIES OF OBJECTS
Shapes
Textures
Tastes
Etc.
RELATIONS BETWEEN EXPERIENCES/STATES AND OTHER EXPERIENCES/STATE
Before
After
During
If, then
The one who ...
GRAMMAR of ongoing processes (is doing), states (is) and commands; also person and number, negation, wide range of range of question words, yes-no, etc.
So doing the First 100 Hours for the first time in twelve years, I notice some of the most basic bits of experience are missing. For example, nothing about hardness/softness among the properties of objects. In relations between experiences/states, there was no during (while, when). Actually, it is really time to sit down with the First 100 hours and the outline above, and think of important holes missing. We want to manage starting to understand speech and to interact verbally in all these aspects of experience (and no doubt more) with 800 to 1000 vocabulary items. i.e., space for "conquering the world" is limited. Time is too. Make wise choices.
Well, we maybe need a whole bunch of people together who have done the First 100 hours and brainstorm again to update. We don't want to change the instructions for the games and their order, but the gaps we see (like hard/soft) can be filled in without changing the instructions or order. We could have an appendix if we want to update certain games. But if we change the games or their order, then we defeat the beautiful, caring work done to translate the First 100 Hours for GPs of many languacultural backgrounds (Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Arabic, etc., etc.) learning many host languages.
One thing we noticed is that key concepts ("vocabulary") need to be added to the games. You recall that our Phase One activities are not too much about "useful expressions for the real world". Our supercharged participation sessions are part of the real, host world--the only part that is accessible enough for enough hours that we can grow much during this early stage. And as we play, we "conquer the world". That is, we want to start understanding speech, and then talking, about the basics of everyday experience, because that is what we will build on in Phase 2.
PEOPLE (man, woman, boy, girl)
Their bodies (body parts, possessive)
Their emotions and physical conditions
Their appearances
Names of their family relationships
Their most basic actions (run, walk, take, read, buy, sneeze, barf...)
ANIMALS (included early because of their place in discourse)
Household animals (if there is such a thing)
Farm animals
Wild animals
Creepy crawlies
HOUSE
Parts of of it
Contents of it
The OUTSIDE area where most outside daily business is done
The COUNTRYSIDE and it's contents
Natural features
Agricultural features
Maybe salient countries
PROPERTIES OF OBJECTS
Shapes
Textures
Tastes
Etc.
RELATIONS BETWEEN EXPERIENCES/STATES AND OTHER EXPERIENCES/STATE
Before
After
During
If, then
The one who ...
GRAMMAR of ongoing processes (is doing), states (is) and commands; also person and number, negation, wide range of range of question words, yes-no, etc.
So doing the First 100 Hours for the first time in twelve years, I notice some of the most basic bits of experience are missing. For example, nothing about hardness/softness among the properties of objects. In relations between experiences/states, there was no during (while, when). Actually, it is really time to sit down with the First 100 hours and the outline above, and think of important holes missing. We want to manage starting to understand speech and to interact verbally in all these aspects of experience (and no doubt more) with 800 to 1000 vocabulary items. i.e., space for "conquering the world" is limited. Time is too. Make wise choices.
Well, we maybe need a whole bunch of people together who have done the First 100 hours and brainstorm again to update. We don't want to change the instructions for the games and their order, but the gaps we see (like hard/soft) can be filled in without changing the instructions or order. We could have an appendix if we want to update certain games. But if we change the games or their order, then we defeat the beautiful, caring work done to translate the First 100 Hours for GPs of many languacultural backgrounds (Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, French, Arabic, etc., etc.) learning many host languages.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
It's OK to use the "familiar imperative" in Phase 1, for goodness sake.
Session 24 is over and Session 25 is similar to it. Can't get much closer to Phase 2 without being there!
Our wonderful nurturer has generally given TPR commands in the "familiar imperative", though often with a helping verb or some such thing added to the root that to us makes it seem a bit more formal. Yesterday he seemed to really "get familiar", and used a ton of simple, bare-root commands, with the verbs as simple as he could make them. That is great, as I think it employs the "base form" from which other verb forms differ in various ways, and it really makes that base form clear.
This is a difference between the GPA and what many "language learners" understand they should do, and is an example of something that causes objections to the GPA. The whole idea of learning commands in the "familiar imperative" seems so counter-intuitive to most people who think much about it, since "We'll never use that form in 'real life'." "Counter-intuitive" really means, "in conflict with my unexamined folk-theory of language and language learning".
Saying, "We'll never use it in 'real life'," assumes that supercharged participation sessions are not "real life," though in fact, they are, overwhelmingly, the primary host-world "real life" in Phase 1. The complaint also misses the time dimension, which is so often missed by so many, in so many ways. Man, get a couple hundred common verb stems in your mental lexicon, for goodness sake! That is something you can do well now following the principle that you grow best when a nurturer interacts with you in your growth zone.
The dreams people have in mind of "real life language use", are just that—dreams. Such "language use" is not remotely within reach for GPs within the first 100 hours. In the richest, most supportive setting of social interaction that is possible (which means in your supercharged participation with your paid nurture), by the end of Phase 1, for you to get an intelligible sentence together and out of your mouth is an enormous struggle. You're just not out there "in public" richly addressing all sorts of people using imperative sentences. So who cares, if you mainly know the familiar forms during the Phase 1 games, if that helps you to get to know a lot that is easy to build on, and to grow really well at this point?
The familiar imperative is in fact, in this and many languacultures, an excellent foundation for the range of verb forms yet to flood in at the right time through the right games and discourses. Adding the polite forms to already known familiar forms will be so relatively easy once you are ready to start using a lot of imperatives "in public" (Phase 3?), having hundreds of base forms to build on. You did what helped you grow best at time X (the simple, familiar imperatives) and that made you ready to grow further, in ways in which you grow best at time Y (picking up polite imperatives). By the time any imperatives are really relevant to "real life" you'll know how to form them, and to use them (though you won't likely be using them in a host-like manner for a considerable time) . So what is the big hairy deal about only hearing polite imperatives from the first day.
We have become explicit that in Phase 1, we grow well if our nurturer interacts with us by playing with us in our growth zone. So the word "play" is now a serious technical term of the GPA.
Anyway, Angela and I are again surprised how much we've changed in a measly 100 hours, both becoming those "new yous" (the plural of "new you") within the experience of our nurturer inside his languacultural world (and soon that of other host people). We have a lot more "new yous" to become in the experience of host people.
Today we started out our supercharged participation session with a whole hour of Session 22 Game 7, using the setup pictured a couple of posts ago. I noticed a turtle among the toys, and so asked Angela to get out the rabbit. I then forced her to tell the story of the Hare and the Tortoise, as I acted it out with the toy rabbit, toy turtle, and other props. Pretty Phase-2-like, eh! Well, Phase 2 is only a couple of hours away.
Our wonderful nurturer has generally given TPR commands in the "familiar imperative", though often with a helping verb or some such thing added to the root that to us makes it seem a bit more formal. Yesterday he seemed to really "get familiar", and used a ton of simple, bare-root commands, with the verbs as simple as he could make them. That is great, as I think it employs the "base form" from which other verb forms differ in various ways, and it really makes that base form clear.
This is a difference between the GPA and what many "language learners" understand they should do, and is an example of something that causes objections to the GPA. The whole idea of learning commands in the "familiar imperative" seems so counter-intuitive to most people who think much about it, since "We'll never use that form in 'real life'." "Counter-intuitive" really means, "in conflict with my unexamined folk-theory of language and language learning".
Saying, "We'll never use it in 'real life'," assumes that supercharged participation sessions are not "real life," though in fact, they are, overwhelmingly, the primary host-world "real life" in Phase 1. The complaint also misses the time dimension, which is so often missed by so many, in so many ways. Man, get a couple hundred common verb stems in your mental lexicon, for goodness sake! That is something you can do well now following the principle that you grow best when a nurturer interacts with you in your growth zone.
The dreams people have in mind of "real life language use", are just that—dreams. Such "language use" is not remotely within reach for GPs within the first 100 hours. In the richest, most supportive setting of social interaction that is possible (which means in your supercharged participation with your paid nurture), by the end of Phase 1, for you to get an intelligible sentence together and out of your mouth is an enormous struggle. You're just not out there "in public" richly addressing all sorts of people using imperative sentences. So who cares, if you mainly know the familiar forms during the Phase 1 games, if that helps you to get to know a lot that is easy to build on, and to grow really well at this point?
The familiar imperative is in fact, in this and many languacultures, an excellent foundation for the range of verb forms yet to flood in at the right time through the right games and discourses. Adding the polite forms to already known familiar forms will be so relatively easy once you are ready to start using a lot of imperatives "in public" (Phase 3?), having hundreds of base forms to build on. You did what helped you grow best at time X (the simple, familiar imperatives) and that made you ready to grow further, in ways in which you grow best at time Y (picking up polite imperatives). By the time any imperatives are really relevant to "real life" you'll know how to form them, and to use them (though you won't likely be using them in a host-like manner for a considerable time) . So what is the big hairy deal about only hearing polite imperatives from the first day.
We have become explicit that in Phase 1, we grow well if our nurturer interacts with us by playing with us in our growth zone. So the word "play" is now a serious technical term of the GPA.
Anyway, Angela and I are again surprised how much we've changed in a measly 100 hours, both becoming those "new yous" (the plural of "new you") within the experience of our nurturer inside his languacultural world (and soon that of other host people). We have a lot more "new yous" to become in the experience of host people.
Today we started out our supercharged participation session with a whole hour of Session 22 Game 7, using the setup pictured a couple of posts ago. I noticed a turtle among the toys, and so asked Angela to get out the rabbit. I then forced her to tell the story of the Hare and the Tortoise, as I acted it out with the toy rabbit, toy turtle, and other props. Pretty Phase-2-like, eh! Well, Phase 2 is only a couple of hours away.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Postponing activities in Phase 1 until a day later, and a hint at why
In the First 100 Hours plan, there is a basic strategy of introducing new material in one session (the "first encounter"), and then for sure reusing it soon in another (a "strengthening" activity), often moving from understanding only to understanding and talking. Going through the First 100 Hours again after twelve years, I've been noticing that sometimes the "strengthening activity" is not in a later session from the "first encounter" activity, but instead, later in the same session. That is O.K., as long as the strengthening activity doesn't involve a switch from understanding only to understanding and talking. An example today was Activity 7 of Session 22 (in place of "Activity" I now like to say "Game"). Earlier in Session 22, actions like climbing, flying, driving, riding, etc. were learned through TPR in Activity (Game) 4, and strengthened through more TPR in Games 5 and 6, using the set up pictured in the previous post. However, then comes Game 7, which would have the GPs using the new materials in talking, describing situations which involve these new actions.
Whenever I see that we haven't separated into separate sessions (indeed separate days) a "first encounter" games that involve only understanding from a "strengthening" game that also involves talking, I skip the latter game for the time being, and come back to it in a day or two. This also gives us a chance to listen to the recordings in between the "first encounter" game and the "strengthening" game that includes talking.
There was an interesting article in Psychological Science in 2007, "Sleep associated changes in the mental representation of spoken words." I hesitate to mention it as it is the sort of stuff that feeds into pop-psychology sensationalism (like "right brain and left brain" and primitive tribes who can't conceive of the not-too-recent past or tell lies). In fact this article is a serious study, and worth thinking about. The authors had a way to distinguish (it can be reasonably argued) between a new word that people merely remembered (episodically) and a word that was actually playing a role in the "mental lexicon" during listening, that is being used by the "brain's dictionary" as part of the normal listening comprehension process. The study wasn't about second language words, but still seems tantalizing from our perspective.
It didn't matter how many hours people knew a new word. That word didn't become part of their mental lexicon (hence their linguistic listening comprehension system) until a period of sleep had occurred. It looks as if something happens during sleep that moves a word from being something you remember to something that is functioning in your language system.
It isn't easy to extrapolate from this to the fact that I like to have a night's sleep between Session 22 Game 6 and Session 22 Game 7-- to sleep on it, you might. But I hang out this bit of maybe-not-trivia for your consideration all the same.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Personal Phase 1 saga: Something must be happening!
We're in Session 20 of Phase 1B, on the way to Session 25 (end of Phase 1), and hoping to make it before leaving for two and a half weeks a week and a half from now.
I feel like we haven't learned very much. Today, in Session 19, there was "Warmup Activity: GPs comment about things they can see and hear in the room, through the window or door, etc."
Out the door/window came first. Then kitchen. It was amazing how we could just stand there and describe most of what we could see (with a bit of scaffolding by the nurturer, of course). I was really caught by surprise, in fact, flabbergasted. Guess we've been learning something. We had never talked about those particular places before, nor thought about talking about them, nor talked about other such places. Yet the speech rolled (all things considered), and we were nowhere near done doing what we could have done when we stopped. We must have learned something in our supercharged participation!
Thanks to our wonderful nurturer (who recently bookmarked this blog).
Now, of course, describing the here-and-now doesn't get you very far, since a lot of the point of languaculture is to be able to discourse about the then-and-there. Still, first things first! Do what you can do, and then as you can do more, do that next.
I feel like we haven't learned very much. Today, in Session 19, there was "Warmup Activity: GPs comment about things they can see and hear in the room, through the window or door, etc."
Out the door/window came first. Then kitchen. It was amazing how we could just stand there and describe most of what we could see (with a bit of scaffolding by the nurturer, of course). I was really caught by surprise, in fact, flabbergasted. Guess we've been learning something. We had never talked about those particular places before, nor thought about talking about them, nor talked about other such places. Yet the speech rolled (all things considered), and we were nowhere near done doing what we could have done when we stopped. We must have learned something in our supercharged participation!
Thanks to our wonderful nurturer (who recently bookmarked this blog).
Now, of course, describing the here-and-now doesn't get you very far, since a lot of the point of languaculture is to be able to discourse about the then-and-there. Still, first things first! Do what you can do, and then as you can do more, do that next.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
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.
Saturday, January 26, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, January 25, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
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.
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