Turkish Session Diary 10: A hunting warm-up game

Ever since I had my first proper WAYK session with Arne I was convinced that its real power is unleashed in its "hunting" form. Its "pushing" form is very effective in itself, where the practitioner is the driving force. But it's when the learners are put in the driving seat and acquire the skill of "pulling" the language from the fluent speaker that it really becomes a supercharged engine of language acquisition.

In subsequent posts (Turkish Session Diaries 6, 7 and 8 and "On the art of hunting language") I pondered the question of how to help learners develop this skill. My attempts at explaining and demonstrating had only had limited success, but this week two things happened that gave me inspiration just in the nick of time.

The first was a Facebook post by Latin teacher Eric Mentges (private link) in which he explained how his "students worked in groups on forming an English set up based on a card they drew" after which "each group presented their set up and the others had to guess what they were going for" and they "then discussed which example ... was most obvious, what other possible interpretations there could be". This sort of thing sounded like just the ticket.

The second was last night when I played the Uno Pictionary card game with some friends. This is different from normal Pictionary in that there are no pens or paper involved, you have a selection of 20-odd small cards with different shapes, stick men, stick houses and so on. By using the cards in ingenious combinations together with a bit of miming you help your team mates to guess the word (see annoying ad). It occurred to me that exactly the same sort of ingenuity is required for language hunting, using limited vocabulary and a limited range of objects to help the fluent speaker provide the needed word.

Today we played a game in English with the following simple rules:

The hunter draws a card with a word on it. To enable the group to guess the word, he must use only the objects in the Set-up or others that are readily available. To begin with he can only use the words "What is this?", but he can reuse words used by the group as they guess. Miming is, of course, encouraged.

The Set-up was three glasses and a bottle of water. The words I started out with in the deck included "empty", "full", "drink", "thirsty", "pour", "spill", "taste" and "share". I first demonstrated and then the learners took turns, with some coaching from me. For the second round I got them to come up with some new words, and they came up with some imaginative options like "top", "tall", "round" and "drop".

Then I pretended not to speak any English, and got them to hunt the same words from me in Turkish. Pretty soon we ran up against some interesting quirks. For example, in Turkish if you describe someone as "big" or "small" you are referring to their age, and we describe tall people as "long" because there is no separate word. Ultimately it served to demonstrate the advantage of contextual, Set-up based learning instead of double-encoding meaning in both a first and a second language.

Of course the main thing was they were finally hunting!

Turkish Session Diary 6: A breakthrough!

In my last Turkish Session Diary post I said that I believed I had made probably the most important innovation yet with my group by introducing role-playing games to help my learners get used to using what they had learned by repeating set conversations.

Now on Week 13 I think I have really started to tap into the WAYK magic like never before, by teaching them how to pull (hunt) language from me instead of relying on me to push it to them.

Ever since I played with Arne I realised that this is what I had been missing all along. Using nothing more than a Setup and sign-language, and no English, to pull language from someone was a very different experience. While learning something by rote and then being forced to use it is undoubtedly effective, going out and getting what you need as you need it is even more so. But how would I get my group to do it? And how would I rein the process in and ensure we learn language systematically?

After watching a number of videos (such as Tea with Grandma in Latin and ASL from back in 2010 and the Advanced WAYK: Mandarin Push/Pull and Advanced WAYK: Spanish Push/Pull demonstration videos) to make sure I understood the concept, I hit upon the idea of first demonstrating how to pull by pretending to be an English student and hunting English from one of them. This proved to be quite effective.

I also realised that language hunts can be random, but they can also be planned. This is something I'm going to be working on a bit more. For next time, I'm going to come up with a goal conversation to function as my lesson plan, and then talk with the group about how exactly they're going to pull it from me. So before we start we will have decided what kind of Obvious Setups to use and what kind of questions to pose. I expect we will be Drawing a Blank a lot.

All things considered I think this introduction went as well as could be. Check it out!

Playing and discussing WAYK with Arne Sostack

The other day I Skyped with experienced WAYK practitioner Arne Sostack, who runs the innovative WAYK site inthehat.dk. I learnt some Danish, but more importantly I experienced WAYK for the first time as a language learner and I finally understood some of the key concepts of WAYK.

00:00 Arne starts pushing Danish to Joel
06:13 Joel starts pulling Danish from Arne
15:00 Joel starts pushing Turkish to Arne
17:23 Why it's important to use the Technique hand signs
20:38 Arne starts pulling Turkish from Joel
37:09 A chat about pulling, how to teach pulling, and the connection with TQ Setup
40:25 The wisdom of Tea with Grandma
46:35 Turning paying students into teachers?
54:53 The question of structure in a seemingly random process

Here is my take-home: The real magic happens when the learner is self-motivated, self-confident, and knows what they want to learn. In other words, proactive. So the question is, how do you take a group of learners who have never known anything except passive learning and engender that proactive mentality?

Earlier this week I posted about the song-and-game approach I currently have going. I can see now that this is still not quite WAYK, and as I discussed with Arne, teaching them how to pull language is probably the most valuable skill I could teach them, even more than actual words and grammar I teach them.

Realistically, I think it would have been an uphill struggle to get my current group to both decide for themselves what they need to learn next and then to pull it. My role-playing games could well make this process easier, because what they need to pull is already abundantly obvious. So now I'm thinking of a way to teach them how to pull in the context of a role-playing game.

Tea with Grandma is definitely something I want to try. Perhaps I could start by pushing some of the phrases they'll need and then move on to the group role-play.

As for lending structure to the process and covering an even range of language, I think it could well work for me to push what I want to push, set up a role-playing scenario, and then let them pull whatever else they want to. Then you get the best of both worlds.

These are just my current musings, stay tuned for what I do with them. This week's lesson has been moved to Friday 8 August, so I should be posting after then...