Turkish Session Diary 12: Full circle

All the way back in July I posted about my first epiphany with WAYK where I broke the mould of session patterns and started with genuine role-playing games. After that point I started to achieve some genuine acquisition instead of merely giving my students some glorified mnemonics.

I dubbed that post "Songs and games" by way of analogy to repetitious session patterns (songs) and goal-based interaction (games). However it just so happened that last week we spontaneously came up with a real song, which we tentatively named Ode to a Pen. It seemed like a good way to cement in the mind some rather complicated syntax and suffixes (original Turkish in bold, gloss in italic, English translation in regular):

You can even sing along if you like:

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	benim	kalem-im.
This	my	pen-my.
This is my pen.

Kalem-im-i	ban-a	ver.
Pen-my-[object]	me-to	give.
Give me my pen.

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	onun	kalem-i.
This	his/her	pen-his/her.
This is his/her pen.

Kalem-i-ni	o-na	ver.
Pen-his/her-[object]	s/he-to	give.
Give him/her his/her pen.

Bu	bir	kalem.
This	a	pen.
This is a pen.

Bu	senin	kalem-in.
This	your	pen-your.
This is your pen.

Kalem-in-i	…	al!
Pen-your-[object]		take!
Take your pen!

Before a "performance" we would say "Person A is singing to Person B, and we're all singing with Person A", and then between each verse Person B would perform the action.

I think it did quite a bit of good because they tell me they were all practising at home, but it was still a song, a set repetition, a glorified mnemonic. So in the next session, after reviewing the song, we played a role-playing game. Once again we had come full circle: the real magic was in the role-play.

Goal-Oriented Setups

Ultimately I have concluded that a TQ Setup that only makes meaning (the "what") TQ Obvious is nowhere near as effective as one that has a defined purpose (the "why"). I see TQ Silly Conversation as a nod to this problem that only goes halfway to a solution. True, getting everybody used to having aimless conversations about the objects in front of them is a great stepping stone to hunting, but it's no substitute for an actual goal or purpose.

So in my opinion role-play, the "why", is fundamental to setups in their most effective form. Back in July I wrote about two role-playing setups, Liar and Boss/Employee/Shopkeeper, that really helped speed things up in terms of actual acquisition and actual fluency as opposed to familiarity with a script or a song. Most recently we've been playing Lost and Found: "I've just found a bunch of phones and wallets/purses and I want to return them to their rightful owners, but I'm a bit simple and I can't even recognise my own things!" etc.

But what about hunting?

Yeah, about that. Although I am convinced that a skilled, motivated hunter will acquire language quickly, I'm not sure that it's the be-all and end-all. When you're out to revitalise a language by galvanising a group of youngsters to tap grandma's brain, sure, hunting is vital. But in a formal language teaching setting, it's a very difficult skill to impart quickly enough to count within the few fleeting hours you have before the end of the course.

What I am doing, though, is implementing the technique which I think isolates the "active ingredient", as it were, of hunting as respects language acquisition: TQ Just in Time. This derives from the observation that "Information and ability is acquired most deeply and rapidly at the moment of its greatest relevance."

So here's my current how-to for lesson planning:

1. Decide what vocabulary/grammar you want to cover, while of course observing TQ Limit.
2. Devise a role-playing setup/scenario where the learners are bound to need said vocabulary/grammar.
3. Explain the game in the students' native language.
4. Make them try to say what they want to say in the target language, then correct them when they get it wrong.

I used this last time to teach "to put in the bag" (çantaya koymak). The game was Where To Put It? (on the table, on the tissue, or in the bag?) and it was amazing to see how they never even asked what it meant in English. They just attempted "Put the pen in the bag", I supplied them with the correct sentence, we went round the table practising it, and all four of them were fluent in that bitesize piece in the space of 10 minutes.

The great thing about this setup is it gives students scope to hunt as much or as little as they want. If you've done it properly they should "need" the language you want them to learn today anyway, but if they want to get creative within the context of the role-play, they can. It's just up to you to keep an eye on the TQ Limit and especially TQ Full.

In summary, I think I can see a way to codifying an effective WAYK-based curriculum for formal language teaching, oriented around role-playing setups. In other words, I feel like I've reached the crest of the learning curve. But it's going to be a long way down the hill...

Turkish Session Diary 11: Supercharge setups with role-play

This week the learners decided they wanted to work on possessives. I was game.

For obviousness, I wanted to use the learners' personal objects, so before long I had their phones and purses/wallets (fortunately the same word in Turkish) out on the table. For a third class of objects I got three sugar sachets and wrote our names on them. In hindsight I could have used their keys. Imagine that, a Where Are Your Keys? practitioner not thinking to use keys...

We worked through the "Is this my phone? Yes this is your phone. Is this your phone? Yes this is my phone. Is this her phone? Yes this is her phone" routine with all the possible permutations, but before long I started to sense a descent into aimless repetition, disconnected somewhat from the actual meaning.

So once we had enough material I explained, in English, that we were now going to have a role play. "I've got everybody's stuff, and so now you need to find out who they all belong to and return them to their rightful owners." It worked like a charm.

Player: What's this?
Hoarder: This is a phone.
Player: Whose phone is this?
Hoarder: This is her phone.
Player: [Indignantly] Well, give her her phone!
Hoarder: OK OK!
Player: Whose phone is this?
Hoarder: [Sheepishly] This is your phone...
Player: [Indignantly] Give me my phone!

So I think when you've got learners who aren't quite into hunting yet, role-playing is a vital element in any set-up.

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!

On the art of hunting language

Pondering our first forays into language "pulling" or "hunting", as opposed to me just "pushing" the language onto the learners, it appears that getting the person you're hunting language from to understand what word you're looking for is something of an art. At least it's something you have to have a knack for. Although last week didn't really go badly, it didn't go as well as I'd hoped and I'm not sure if that was because it was a new concept and they were nervous, or if it isn't actually so intuitive after all.

If my learners continue to stall, how am I going to help them get the knack of language hunting? Could I come up with an approach that I could replicate for any other group of learners in the future?

I thought it might be useful to try and dissect what's going on when you're in the position of pulling language from a native speaker without any other common language. I remember the Advanced WAYK: Spanish Push/Pull video showcased a process of "Getting Hungry, Setting the Trap, Springing the Trap, Cooking It Up, Serving It Up" which must relate to this somewhat. Unfortunately I have yet to see a proper write-up.

Still, I have tried to identify the techniques (with a small "t") that I tend to use and I see others using when pulling language from a fluent speaker:

First: The Hunt

1. Use a Question Phrase
Question phrases that help you ask about specific words and expressions are probably what anyone should learn first when embarking on learning a new language "in the field".

What is that? (nouns)
How is that? What kind of __ is that? (adjectives)
What is it doing? What does it do? (verbs)

The following are universal:

How do we/should I say that?
Is that right?

2. Mime

Of course one has to assume that one's fluent speaker is not conversant with sign language, and will only understand obvious, not abstract, signs. Obvious Setups are also very important. This technique can be used in combination with incomplete sentences and question phrases.

Hunter: I say "boo" [acts out somebody trying to take someone else by surprise and frighten them] and he says "Aaa!" [switches to the other role]. What did I do?
Speaker: You... scared him?
Hunter: Yes! I scared him!

3. Draw a Blank (TQ)/Attempt the Sentence

This also requires an Setup to make the intended meaning Obvious. This works best when the Hunter has the rest of the sentence down pat.

Hunter: I give this money to you and you give this pen to me. You are ... [Draws a Blank with his hands] -ing this to me.
Speaker: Selling this to you?
Hunter: Yes! Selling this to me.

4. Break the concept down into simpler parts

This is like explaining complex concepts to a small child. In both situations, the concept must first be conveyed and then the word for that concept is provided. The difference is that with a child, the adult both conveys the concept and provides the word; in language hunting the learner conveys the concept so the fluent speaker will provide the word.

Hunter: Every four, five years everybody chooses who they want to be President.
Speaker: You mean an election?
Hunter: Yes, an election. During the election everybody writes down who they want to be President and puts this piece of paper in a box.
Speaker: Yes.
Hunter: What is this piece of paper?
Speaker: A vote?
Hunter: Yes! A vote.

Any or all of the above methods may be used to help the fluent speaker understand what we're trying to say, and then say it for us, helping us to "spot" what we are trying to hunt.

Next: The Chase

When hunting, it’s not enough to just spot your quarry. Now the chase is on! It’s the same with hunting language. Hopefully a combination of techniques will prompt our fluent speaker to give us the word we are looking for. But it’s not ours yet! We have to chase it down, in other words make sure we understand it correctly and know how to use it.

Hunter: Where is your house?
Speaker: It's in the city.
Hunter: How should I say this, "Where is your house?"
Speaker: "Where do you live?"

Spotted! Now the chase is on!

1. Prove it!

Hunter: OK, where do you live?
Speaker: I live in the city.
Hunter: OK, so your house is in the city?
Speaker: Yes.
Hunter: You are always in the city?
Speaker: Yes, I am always in the city.

2. Practise it (circling).

Hunter: Where does he live?
Speaker: He also lives in the city.
Hunter: Does he live near to you?
Speaker: No, he lives on the other side of the city.
Hunter: Where do I live?
Speaker: You live in the country.
Hunter: How long are you living in the city?
Speaker: "Have you lived".
Hunter: Ah OK. How long have you lived in the city?
Speaker: About 4 years. ...

So that's where I'm at so far. I look forward to any observations, especially if there's anything I've missed.

Perhaps I won't need to go through all this with my group. I expect the best method is probably just to tell them to Start at the Beginning and keep going until they get to something they don't know, and then let them work it out. Still, these notes may be useful for coaching as and when we get stuck. The more I think about it, the more I anticipate that "free hunts" will be the best way to go in the beginning, so they work as much of this out by themselves as possible, before then moving on to planned hunts.

In planned hunts, like Tea with Grandma, we will first establish our role-playing scenario, then discuss what language they can hunt from me using it. I hope this will make for a nice balance between systematically covering a syllabus and adapting the sessions to the needs and preferences of the learners.

WAYK nedir?

Açılımı "Where Are Your Keys?" (Anahtarların Nerede?) olan WAYK, akıcı şekilde konuşturmayı amaçlayan bir dil öğretme sistemidir. Onu geliştirenin amacı, herhangi bir dil öğretme metodunu geliştirmekten ziyade unutulmaya yüz tutmuş dilleri yeniden canlandırmaktır. Bu hem başarısının sırrıdır hem de şimdiye dek geniş çapta duyulmamış olmasının sebebidir.

Herhangi bir hizmetin ya da ürünün "başarılı" olması için rakiplerinden daha iyi olması değil, daha iyi pazarlanması önemlidir. Bu her sektörde olduğu gibi dil öğreniminde de geçerlidir. Öte yandan WAYK için cazip reklamlarla öğrenci kandırmak, olmayınca da "daha çok çalışsaydınız olurdu" demek gibi bir seçenek söz konusu değil; somut bir soruna somut bir çözüm getirmeyi amaçlıyor. Sorunu çözmeli yoksa devam etmesinin bir anlamı yoktur.

Peki bu kadar başarılıysa neden bilinmiyor? Amerika Yerlilerinin dillerini korumasına yardım etmek değerli bir amaç olsa da "ana akımın" çok dışındadır, üstelik ticari menfaat da sağlamaz. Maalesef parayla dönen bir dünyada yaşıyoruz. Asil amaçlarla başarılanlar ise uzun süre keşfedilmemiş kalabiliyor.

Peki WAYK'ın sırrı nedir? Bu sorunun cevabı şu soruda gizli: Dilleri en iyi kim öğrenir? Çocuklar. Peki çocuklar tüm gün ne yapar? Oyun oynarlar. Nasıl bu kadar kolay dil öğrendiklerine şaşırıyoruz. Hiçbir gramer kuralı izah edilmeden veya kelime listeleri ezberletilmeden güle oynaya konuşmayı öğreniyorlar. WAYK'ın biraz da çıkış noktası bu. Ders okutulmaz, oyun oynanır. Hiçbir şey izah edilmez, doğrusu buna gerek kalmaz. Temel "oyun kuralları" ve biraz da işaret dili kullanılarak kelimeler ve gramer esasları beyne deyim yerindeyse "çaktırılıyor". Yapılan hatalar oyunun tadı tuzu gibi geçiştiriliyor ve çok geçmeden öğrenciler, doğrusu "oyun arkadaşları", strese telaşa girmeden akıcı şekilde konuşmaya başlıyor.

Fethiye WAYK olarak naçizane şekilde WAYK sistemini klasik bir dil kursuna dönüştürmeyi hedefliyoruz. Bu blogta ise yolculuğumuzu belgeliyoruz. Yabancılar için Türkçe kursu ile başlayıp, Türkler için İngilizce kursu da geliştirmeyi umuyoruz. Bu esnada çoğu yazımızı İngilizce yazsak da Türkçe olarak da sizi bilgilendirmeyi ihmal etmeyeceğiz.

Damlaya damlaya göl olur derler...

Fethiye WAYK Curriculum takes shape

I am proud to announce that the infrastructure of the Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum over on the wiki is complete and ready for expansion.

At the moment only the first three parts of Ride 1 are complete, but the point is, they are complete. From now on the underlying structure is ready to be expanded with the material as we add it.

So, how would you like a tour?

Rides

Everything, of course, revolves around the "Ride" pages. Ride pages first specify the Set-up used throughout the ride, and then at the beginning of each Part, the new Craig's Lists (CL) and Fairies' Lists (FL) introduced are listed with clickable links to each CL and FL. Next to each of these CL and FL links is a list of the specific vocabulary and grammar elements that are used from them. Each element is also clickable, and links to that element's entry in the Vocabulary or Grammar Master List.  

Then the Ride details the Conversation that the group is to work towards. Conversation Links are small chunks of dialogue, to be strung together into Conversation Chains. Conversation Chains are there as a suggestion for teachers, helping them to systematically mix and match the Links in a logical progression as the game proceeds.

Set-ups

While the table-and-objects set-up will suffice for much of the course, as we progress there may be a need for more imaginative "set-ups" which will still be as "obvious" and uncluttered as possible, but will expand the game. "The Walk" is one; as we get to more advanced stages, our scenarios may come to resemble amateur dramatics as much a games. Unleash your imagination!

Craig's Lists and Fairies' Lists

Craig's Lists (CL) are small, logical groups of vocabulary. These may be put together because they are introduced together in the same session, or they may represent a category of words that are added to as the course progresses. 

The original idea behind Craig's Lists was that a list of words may be repeated together during a session, almost like a song or mantra, to fix them in the brain as a memorable sequence, rather like the ABC song children sing in English. This may not work for all the Craig's Lists in our curriculum, because they now also perform an additional role: Ensuring that all the vocabulary in the Vocabulary Master List is covered. Every single word in the Vocabulary Master List is to be organised into categories and worked into Rides via Craig's Lists.

Fairies' Lists (FL) are the sister of Craig's Lists, but for grammar. In the same way as every entry in the Vocabulary Master List is to be worked into a Craig's List, so too all elements in the Grammar Master List are to be worked into Fairies' Lists. The main difference between a Fairies' List and a Craig's List is that a Fairies' List is never to be explicitly introduced or repeated during a lesson, quite the opposite: The Set-up is to be so carefully crafted that the elements on the Fairies' List simply "click" in the minds of the students automatically, almost as if fairies did it!

Vocabulary and Grammar Master Lists

These are essentially databases of vocabulary and grammar elements that occur in the curriculum. The order in which entries are added does not matter, because they are organised in the Craig's and Fairies' Lists. What matters is that each entry is recorded, and that each occurs only once. The same element may, on the other hand, appear in more than one Craig's or Fairies' List.

The Vocabulary Master List in particular will also serve as a dictionary, making it theoretically possible for a group with no native Turkish speaker to use the curriculum out-of-the-box; one of the group could study and master all the elements of a Ride beforehand, and share them with the group in a WAYK session.

Coming Soon: 

• Sign language demos Links in the Master Lists to specific points in Youtube videos where hand signs are demonstrated.
• Ride Chains Groupings of rides into a "big picture", gradually taking the group to fluency.

Teaching vs. hunting: A draft manifesto

After sleeping on it, the Advanced Spanish Hunting video has helped me refine my thoughts about exactly what I'm doing (or trying to do) in adapting "Where Are Your Keys?"—a comprehensive method in which students become teachers in the noble cause of language revitalisation—to more mundane, mainstream, marketable language teaching.

What We're Taking Away

In the Spanish hunting video, Evan and David explain how they simultaneously hunt new language from each other for their own benefit and build new rides. The ride building process is explained as Getting Hungry, Setting the Trap, Springing the Trap, Cooking It and Serving It Up. As always, I wish there were more documentation, and I can't claim to fully understand what all these stages mean. Still, the general idea is quite clear. As far as I can tell Getting Hungry is the bit where you work out what you're going to learn next, the rest of the stages help you to glean, confirm and internalise that element through Proving and other techniques, and finally Serving it Up is where you have a formalised Ride that can be passed on.

Turning WAYK into a standardised course package will have the side-effect of sucking all the creativity out of the process for my students. I will simply be Serving It Up, and doing the rest behind the scenes as I develop the course week by week. Of course the Rides themselves will still work, but come the end of my course my students will be no more "language hunters" than they were when I first asked them "What is that?"

On a personal note, it has just dawned on my wife and me that the hunting dimension of WAYK will be ideal if and when we decide to try and learn minority languages such as Kurdish, where decent course books are hard to come by. But this is of little interest to a student who needs one language now and is selecting a course for that immediate purpose.

What We're Adding

First and foremost, by successfully applying WAYK—a lesser version of WAYK at that—to build a course that teaches the same amount of language as its rivals faster and more accurately, there will be tangible, documented evidence that WAYK really is as good as it claims to be. Instead of being a little-known, quirky, experimental pretender to the crown of dominant methods in the eyes of the few in the mainstream who have heard of it, WAYK will tower over its rivals as not only better than the competition, but having a vision extending beyond short-term language tutoring.

In addition, despite being "shallower" than the original WAYK because of neglecting the hunting element, the course will be "broader" because it will weave in standard vocabulary at each level as part of a self-contained, marketable package. Open-source documentation will provide a template for teachers in other languages to develop their own courses.

I have written a lot about my worries about taking WAYK and offering lessons with the promise of a comprehensive language course, when said course is still in development and is being documented for the first time. This is why I feel the need for a clear vision starting out. This is a "draft manifesto", it simply reflects my current understanding of how this is going to work, and I'm putting this down to keep my own doubts at bay as much as for anyone else.

A glimpse of fluency

I just re-discovered the WAYK blog post Beyond the Script, the video on which dates all the way back to July 2012, which counts as vintage in this day and age...

So you've got Evan Gardner and Sky Hopinka having a perfectly fluid conversation about tea and coffee, after only a year and a half of using WAYK to learn Chinuk Wawa, if I have that down right. I've got no idea how "hard" Wawa is grammatically, as a pidgin/creole I'd imagine it should be fairly regular, but at any rate to be that fluent in any non-European language after a year and half is amazing.

The more I mull my own outline of a path to fluency, the more I realise that what I'm trying to do here is something very much removed from the concept of language "hunting" per se. Put all the sign language and the TPR and the "How Fascinating" exuberance to one side, I think I now realise that this is the fundamental difference between WAYK and conventional language teaching: WAYK turns everything on its head by making the student learn the method and not the teacher. WAYK is "bottom-up", students are the prime movers, getting the language out of their teachers by hook or by crook and pulling themselves up to fluency. In contrast, any language teaching method or programme you care to name is "top-down", based on the premise that the student is the blank slate and the teacher is the one who cooks and serves everything up on a plate.

I suppose what I'm trying to do here is make a square peg fit a round hole. I'm trying to use WAYK to serve everything up on a plate, when that's not what WAYK was ever about to start with.

Evan and Sky's video is a wonderful demonstration of what WAYK is capable of, but in the blue blazes how? Will WAYK only work for me if I turn my students into language hunters? Or can I just come up with a string of set-ups, have them play them without any initiative at all from them, and still make it work?

Added to which: How broad a vocabulary does Evan have? What else can he talk about besides what will fit on a kitchen table? What are the full range of set-ups he used to get to the stage he's at now (or, rather, was a year and a half back when the video was made)?

Apart from anything else, I don't speak Wawa and I've got no idea how they were implementing the techniques that were labelled on the video as the conversation whizzed by. But I am too demanding; as Evan says at the beginning, the point is proving what WAYK is capable of, and it certainly proved that.

But in the blue blazes how?

Edit: I think I've calmed down a bit now. At the moment my thinking goes like this: It's all in the set-up. If the "set-up" is "obvious" it simply doesn't matter which way the flow of information is going. Just because it's "limited" doesn't mean you can't introduce a "limited" amount of flexibility in the conversations and have more than one possible answer to any given question. The question that still bugs me though is, is my imagination up to coming up with all the set-ups I'm going to need to cover the vocabulary?...

Edit 2: I just noticed that it says on the WAYK website that Evan has been teaching Wawa since 2002 and Sky is the student! That just goes to show how convincing Sky was in the video. For some reason I had just assumed that it would be the native American teaching the native American language to the European. I don't think I need to be embarrassed about that, do I?

Edit 3: Please see The journey to fluency.

Edit 4: Please see A clearer glimpse of fluency.

Getting started

Hello World!

My name is Joel Thomas and together with my wife Gözde we're embarking on a project here in Fethiye, Turkey, of applying the Where Are Your Keys (WAYK) language fluency training methods and their derivatives to mainstream language teaching. Specifically, this blog will be a way for me to document the journey as we develop and document a curriculum/syllabus with specific vocabulary and grammar mastery goals in mind.

We had our first formal session today, and so far so good. Getting people to TQ Copycat is an uphill struggle at the beginning, but the more people you have doing it together the less silly they feel.

We haven't even got through the Universal Speed Curriculum yet. I mean, we have a draft translation but we haven't actually play-tested it all yet. A strict translation requires several times more new grammar than the equivalent English, so in line with TQ Limit there will be modifications. As and when we've play-tested it all I'll be uploading it to the wiki, and then we'll go from there.

So, that'll be all for now...

PS: I've been posting some on the WAYK and LH Google groups already, and in a way they form the background to this blog. For anyone who's interested in giving advice and would like to see some of my thoughts up to this point, please see the following chronological list:

WAYK for agglutinative languages
Explaining fairies: Why a joke isn't funny when you have to explain it
Hi from Turkey
Syllabus framework