Just back from this week's session (last week's was postponed to Friday, which is why the next session came around so quickly).
This week we went straight in with the buying-selling role-play, but at first we just had a review round. I had the learner to my right start by asking me how much for a pen. She declared my price "çok pahalı!" (too expensive), and haggled me down a bit before buying it. This yielded a "ride" of sorts, which we repeated three times and then passed around the table.
Then we came back to the idea of "pulling" language in day-to-day conversation with Turkish speakers, although in the context of our session they would be pulling the language from me. First I asked what else we might want to ask about a product besides its being expensive or cheap. We decided we were going to find out how to ask about "quality", "life" in the case of batteries and so on, and whether or not it has a "guarantee".
For "quality" we talked about how we might make it clear to someone that we were talking about quality so they would know to give us the word. We discussed that we might ask if it was "good", and also make gestures such as flicking and "trying" to bend the pen. I had the learner to the left of me try this, and I gave her the word kalite. As it turned out, we ended up learning two words: kalite, the noun "quality", and kaliteli, the adjective meaning "of good quality".
For "life" or "lifetime", we tried to practise saying something as best we could with incomplete Turkish, so the other person knows what we are trying to say, and then saying Nasıl deriz? (How do we say that?). I wasn't very good at getting the idea across, so the learner to the left of me would start the conversation, ask me "How long can I use this for?" and so on, but then forget to say Nasıl deriz? at the critical moment. But still, they got the idea so I'm hoping this will work better next time. (The Turkish for "guarantee", garanti, came out all by itself as this particular learner already knew it.)
We worked Craig's Lists into the session for the first time yet with this group. Off-the-cuff I set one up to simultaneously cover vocabulary and Turkish's dual genitive-possessive construction: uzunluk (length), genişlik (width), bunun uzunluğu (this [thing]'s length), bunun genişliği (this [thing]'s width).
To next time!
Showing posts with label sign language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sign language. Show all posts
Monday, 11 August 2014
Sunday, 3 August 2014
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...
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...
Monday, 28 July 2014
Turkish Session Diary 5: Songs and games
Regular readers of this blog (assuming there are more than one) will remember that last time I had set an objective of having some sort of "free practice" to provide what I think the "session patterns" are missing. In this week's lesson I have implemented this to some effect, and I think it's perhaps the single most important innovation yet in my current course.
My own interpretation is that language is essentially a set of reflexes, each triggered by a unique set of "stimuli", the circumstances in which any given word or construction is necessary. Therefore the process of acquisition is the process of establishing that reflex, consisting of trigger and response. I humbly beg to differ with Krashen's view as interpreted by Wikipedia that the process is predominantly passive; conscious effort is certainly required, but focused on the goal and not the process. In other words, acquisition happens when the subconscious is stimulated by immediate necessity to take language that has already been learnt and prime it for automatic recall.
Now, returning to my "session patterns", it had become clear to me that I had been using WAYK as a glorified mnemonic. Not that the glory is undeserved; as mnemonics go the unique combination of comprehensible input (TQ Obvious etc.) and sign language is extremely effective, and accurate. Still, mine had been a process of language learning, not actual acquisition. No reflexes, just crutches of conscious memory.
We played two games specifically engineered to create situations in which the learners would "need" the words and constructions they had already learnt.
The first was a bluffing game we simply called Liar. There were three objects on the table (a coin, a phone and a pen) but four players, as well as me, the "host". Each of the players had a card. There were four cards in play, one for each of the objects plus one with "Liar" written on it. If a player had an object card they owned that object, but if they had the Liar card they were supposed to lie by claiming they owned someone else's object.
The conversation would go something like this:
P1: Bu kalem kimin? (Whose pen is this?)
P2: Bu kalem benim. (This pen is mine.)
P1: Bu para kimin? (Whose is this coin?)
P3: Bu para benim. (This coin is mine.)
P4: Hayır! Bu para benim! (No! This coin is mine.)
P1: Aha! Yalancı var! Sence kim yalancı? (Aha! There is a liar! Who do you think is the liar?)
P2: Bence o yalancı. (I think s/he is the liar.)
P1: Sence kim yalancı? (Who do you think is the liar?)
P5: Bence o yalancı. (I think s/he is the liar.)
P1: Bence o yalancı. Bakalım! (I think s/he is the liar. Let's see!)
Of course you have to explain the rules carefully in the source language, otherwise no end of hilarity ensues when, say, a player with an object card claims someone else's object. Then the group has to choose between two players neither of whom are the liar while the real liar just watches smugly...
The second game was a Boss, Employee, Shopkeeper scenario. Something like this:
Emp.: Merhaba patron! (Hello boss!)
Boss: Merhaba. (Hello.)
Emp.: Ne istiyorsun? (What do you want?)
Boss: Kalem istiyorum. (I want a pen.)
Emp.: Tamam... Merhaba! (OK... Hello!)
S.K.: Merhaba. Patron ne istiyor? (Hello. What does the boss want?)
Emp.: Patron kalem istiyor. (The boss wants a pen.)
S.K.: Kalem var. Nasıl bir kalem istiyor? Siyah mı, kırmızı mı? (There are pens. What kind of pen does he want? Red or black?)
Emp.: Bir saniye... Merhaba patron! (One second... Hello boss!)
Boss: Merhaba. (Hello.)
Emp.: Hangi kalemi istiyorsun, siyah kalemi mi, kırmızı kalemi mi istiyorsun? (Which pen do you want, the red pen or the black pen?)...
And so on.
Everybody had a great time, which was reason enough in itself to do it, but the point was that there were no pre-set lines. Just situations in which everybody had a goal. Because they had already learnt the language to achieve their goal, they managed to recall it as they need it. After a few rounds the trigger-reflex was established and the language was now acquired.
One of the group invited a veteran EFL teacher to sit in on one of our sessions a few weeks ago. She was impressed with WAYK and remarked that she had never seen Turkish taught using the kinds of methods she had used in the past to teach English, with lots of involvement and repetition, and "obviousness". Because she's a newcomer I'm starting her from the beginning, and she's steaming through because she knows what I am trying to do even before I do it. In a way she is acquiring what I give her on-the-fly because she automatically starts freestyling with whatever I give her.
For some like her, the line between learning and acquisition is a non-issue, because they automatically start making the language their own. But with crowds who expect all the creativity to come from the teacher and lack the self-confidence to let their hair down and make mistakes, I think the games will be an important element in bridging the gap between learning and acquiring the language.
Learning vs. acquisition
Serendipitously, a day or two ago I happened upon the Wikipedia page on TPR Storytelling (TPRS). Insofar as it draws on TPR, you could say it is a sort of "cousin methodology" to WAYK, and it certainly seems to have the same sort of down-to-earth, common sense guiding principles. Specifically, I would point to the following observation in that page:
[Language acquisition theorist Stephen] Krashen asserts that there are two distinct ways of learning language: language "learning" and language "acquisition". Language "learning" is learning that takes conscious effort on the part of the learner. It is characterized by learning grammar rules, memorizing vocabulary lists, and performing speaking drills. Language "acquisition" is learning that is subconscious and takes little or no effort on the part of the learner. It is characterized by listening and understanding to (sic) messages, reading interesting books and articles, and other enjoyable activities that take place in the language being learned. According to Krashen's theory, the only thing that can lead to fluency in the language is language "acquisition". Language "learning" can only be used as a way to consciously edit speech or writing, and it is never the cause of spontaneous, unrehearsed speech or writing.I contrast it with the following under Input Hypothesis (Comprehensible Input redirect):
Krashen's hypotheses have been influential in language education, particularly in the United States, but have received criticism from some academics. Two of the main criticisms are that the hypotheses are untestable, and that they assume a degree of separation between acquisition and learning that has not been proven to exist.Assuming this is a fair assessment of their criticisms, one wonders if these particular academics with the second claim have ever actually learnt a foreign language to any level of fluency. If they had they would surely have shared the experience of first learning a word or construction by rote, then having to consciously access the memory of those drills the first time said word or construction is required, and then after a certain number of attempts feeling it "click" as conscious thought no longer becomes necessary.
My own interpretation is that language is essentially a set of reflexes, each triggered by a unique set of "stimuli", the circumstances in which any given word or construction is necessary. Therefore the process of acquisition is the process of establishing that reflex, consisting of trigger and response. I humbly beg to differ with Krashen's view as interpreted by Wikipedia that the process is predominantly passive; conscious effort is certainly required, but focused on the goal and not the process. In other words, acquisition happens when the subconscious is stimulated by immediate necessity to take language that has already been learnt and prime it for automatic recall.
Now, returning to my "session patterns", it had become clear to me that I had been using WAYK as a glorified mnemonic. Not that the glory is undeserved; as mnemonics go the unique combination of comprehensible input (TQ Obvious etc.) and sign language is extremely effective, and accurate. Still, mine had been a process of language learning, not actual acquisition. No reflexes, just crutches of conscious memory.
Fun and games
So this week instead of going through prescribed chunks of language, I set up role-playing scenarios where those reflexes stood a better chance of being created. Throughout, instead of thinking, "Now what was the next line?", they were thinking, "Now I need this" or "I need to do that", in other words the actual triggers for the fluency reflex.We played two games specifically engineered to create situations in which the learners would "need" the words and constructions they had already learnt.
The first was a bluffing game we simply called Liar. There were three objects on the table (a coin, a phone and a pen) but four players, as well as me, the "host". Each of the players had a card. There were four cards in play, one for each of the objects plus one with "Liar" written on it. If a player had an object card they owned that object, but if they had the Liar card they were supposed to lie by claiming they owned someone else's object.
The conversation would go something like this:
P1: Bu kalem kimin? (Whose pen is this?)
P2: Bu kalem benim. (This pen is mine.)
P1: Bu para kimin? (Whose is this coin?)
P3: Bu para benim. (This coin is mine.)
P4: Hayır! Bu para benim! (No! This coin is mine.)
P1: Aha! Yalancı var! Sence kim yalancı? (Aha! There is a liar! Who do you think is the liar?)
P2: Bence o yalancı. (I think s/he is the liar.)
P1: Sence kim yalancı? (Who do you think is the liar?)
P5: Bence o yalancı. (I think s/he is the liar.)
P1: Bence o yalancı. Bakalım! (I think s/he is the liar. Let's see!)
Of course you have to explain the rules carefully in the source language, otherwise no end of hilarity ensues when, say, a player with an object card claims someone else's object. Then the group has to choose between two players neither of whom are the liar while the real liar just watches smugly...
The second game was a Boss, Employee, Shopkeeper scenario. Something like this:
Emp.: Merhaba patron! (Hello boss!)
Boss: Merhaba. (Hello.)
Emp.: Ne istiyorsun? (What do you want?)
Boss: Kalem istiyorum. (I want a pen.)
Emp.: Tamam... Merhaba! (OK... Hello!)
S.K.: Merhaba. Patron ne istiyor? (Hello. What does the boss want?)
Emp.: Patron kalem istiyor. (The boss wants a pen.)
S.K.: Kalem var. Nasıl bir kalem istiyor? Siyah mı, kırmızı mı? (There are pens. What kind of pen does he want? Red or black?)
Emp.: Bir saniye... Merhaba patron! (One second... Hello boss!)
Boss: Merhaba. (Hello.)
Emp.: Hangi kalemi istiyorsun, siyah kalemi mi, kırmızı kalemi mi istiyorsun? (Which pen do you want, the red pen or the black pen?)...
And so on.
Everybody had a great time, which was reason enough in itself to do it, but the point was that there were no pre-set lines. Just situations in which everybody had a goal. Because they had already learnt the language to achieve their goal, they managed to recall it as they need it. After a few rounds the trigger-reflex was established and the language was now acquired.
The missing link
Essentially this approach reflects the the learning/acquisition observation inherent in TPRS and indeed in WAYK. The session patterns I have been using up until now, rather like teaching a song, have been extremely successful in the learning stage. Now with the role-playing games they are truly acquiring the language.One of the group invited a veteran EFL teacher to sit in on one of our sessions a few weeks ago. She was impressed with WAYK and remarked that she had never seen Turkish taught using the kinds of methods she had used in the past to teach English, with lots of involvement and repetition, and "obviousness". Because she's a newcomer I'm starting her from the beginning, and she's steaming through because she knows what I am trying to do even before I do it. In a way she is acquiring what I give her on-the-fly because she automatically starts freestyling with whatever I give her.
For some like her, the line between learning and acquisition is a non-issue, because they automatically start making the language their own. But with crowds who expect all the creativity to come from the teacher and lack the self-confidence to let their hair down and make mistakes, I think the games will be an important element in bridging the gap between learning and acquiring the language.
Tuesday, 22 July 2014
Suffixes and sign language revisited
Since my last post on the subject I have studiously avoided signing any suffixes at all, both on the basis of advice from other WAYK'ers and invaluable training at the school of hard knocks. So far so good, although I have been getting a bit of dissent in the ranks insisting that istiyorsun (you want) should be signed WANT YOU and not just WANT, because -sun is the second person. Still, no biggie.
Nevertheless, a robust system for signing grammar is an attractive idea, and it just so happens that one Anna Andresian has come up with such a system for signing Latin cases and tenses. It's certainly very elegant, and wouldn't need much tweaking for Turkish.
Mind you I'd want to see a demonstration of how it's used in practice before putting it to extensive use, but if nothing else it's another tool to go in the box for when it'll come in handy. Thanks Anna!
Nevertheless, a robust system for signing grammar is an attractive idea, and it just so happens that one Anna Andresian has come up with such a system for signing Latin cases and tenses. It's certainly very elegant, and wouldn't need much tweaking for Turkish.
Mind you I'd want to see a demonstration of how it's used in practice before putting it to extensive use, but if nothing else it's another tool to go in the box for when it'll come in handy. Thanks Anna!
Turkish Session Diary 4: Time flies...
So, here we are 11 weeks in and they're still coming back for more.
While no session ever goes exactly the way I planned it, I have been able to cover some key grammatical concepts that some foreigners take years to master, if they ever do, such as the definite accusative (thinking of it as "the" as some do creates more problems than it solves) and descriptive adjectives ("Is your money existent?" instead of "Have you got any money?").
An innovation that seems to be working well so far is clock cards. At the moment I'm using 12 cards, one for each hour on the clock. So far I've only really used it to teach "How many hours later?" and so on, but it's going to be my springboard into tenses, "When will you...", "When did you..." and so on. Only problem is, if I forget to put something on them when I'm not using them they're liable to blow away! Time flies, as they say...
My session pattern is working well, providing a structure for me to introduce new information at a balanced rate. What I want to work on now is freer and more personalised practice sections. I'll look for the TQ's that describe what I'm talking about more eloquently, but there are two ideas I'm working on: Firstly having a "free practice" bit just before a break or the end of the session where I start them off with a combination of material we've already worked on and tell them to play with it (I've already done this with some success), and secondly use some constructions from the session to talk about things in day-to-day life.
As always, a work in progress. Enjoy this clip from today:
Admittedly, this is not the best video I could have gotten but it gives you an idea of what's going on. They had a bit of trouble with "In 3 hours" (üç saat sonra) and "At 3 o'clock" (saat üçte), but that was because we had been working on üç saat sonra in previous sessions. Still, it wasn't long before they were back into the groove. You can also see the clock cards in action here.
While no session ever goes exactly the way I planned it, I have been able to cover some key grammatical concepts that some foreigners take years to master, if they ever do, such as the definite accusative (thinking of it as "the" as some do creates more problems than it solves) and descriptive adjectives ("Is your money existent?" instead of "Have you got any money?").
An innovation that seems to be working well so far is clock cards. At the moment I'm using 12 cards, one for each hour on the clock. So far I've only really used it to teach "How many hours later?" and so on, but it's going to be my springboard into tenses, "When will you...", "When did you..." and so on. Only problem is, if I forget to put something on them when I'm not using them they're liable to blow away! Time flies, as they say...
My session pattern is working well, providing a structure for me to introduce new information at a balanced rate. What I want to work on now is freer and more personalised practice sections. I'll look for the TQ's that describe what I'm talking about more eloquently, but there are two ideas I'm working on: Firstly having a "free practice" bit just before a break or the end of the session where I start them off with a combination of material we've already worked on and tell them to play with it (I've already done this with some success), and secondly use some constructions from the session to talk about things in day-to-day life.
As always, a work in progress. Enjoy this clip from today:
Admittedly, this is not the best video I could have gotten but it gives you an idea of what's going on. They had a bit of trouble with "In 3 hours" (üç saat sonra) and "At 3 o'clock" (saat üçte), but that was because we had been working on üç saat sonra in previous sessions. Still, it wasn't long before they were back into the groove. You can also see the clock cards in action here.
Tuesday, 3 June 2014
Turkish Session Diary 3: Settling on session patterns
Well, 5 weeks in and my new bunch are still with me.
I've duplicated the Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum on the official wiki over onto fethiyewayk.wikia.com. I won't be creating many new pages as I go forward, so I'll be able to update the official wiki now and again.
A lot of the material is now different after having undergone a number of tweaks. For now I'm just going to go through the pattern I've established that seems to be working well and update the material as I find the time.
When starting, I labour the concept of TQ Copycatting. It very quickly becomes necessary to point out that only people who aren't in the conversation copycat. So when you're the one being asked a question you don't copycat the person asking the question.
TQ How Fascinating is a toughie. Saying, "When we make a mistake we all throw up our arms and say 'How Fascinating'", is a bit counterproductive with retiree Brits. But I still think I'm honouring the spirit by calling "How Fascinating" all the time without calling it that. Lots of TQ Pull You Though It, lots of "No, that was fine!" and lots of laughs, backed up with a pep talk now and then that we're playing a game and having fun, not "learning" or sitting an exam. In the sense of keeping it light and fun, How Fascinating is certainly up there with TQ Signing as one of the absolutely indispensable concepts of the method.
Getting them to avoid speaking English during the lesson is next to impossible sometimes. "Oh what was it, bu, er, siyat kalem, oh no, sorry, siyah kalem, yeah see I keep getting that wrong, was that right, siyah kalem?" etc. Now and again I remind them to make the "timeout" sign if they want to ask something in English, and then just make the sign sometimes when they forget. But I find it's not worth making a big thing of it if it will break the mood, especially when you've barely got them to stop thinking of it as a lesson.
I've also gotten my head around the fact that TQ Killing Faeries is of course good and necessary, but this does not extend to explaining game mechanics. The difference between "I'm going to say what is this, and you're going to say 'It's a...'" and "We're going to say it twice this time round."
Now to the pattern
For each bitesize chunk, I'm following this procedure:
1. Select chunk Although a "Ride" in the Universal Speed Curriculum can be around a dozen lines long, I've discovered the hard way that the ideal size for a bitesize chunk is 4 lines, you-me-you-me. Anything longer is just too much, no matter how familiar the material.
So the ideal chunk is 4 lines long, containing mostly familiar material and focusing on just one new "thing" (TQ Limit). So, for instance, if they already know "What is this?/This is a black pen." (Bu ne?/Bu siyah kalem.) then I might introduce "Whose is this black pen?/This black pen is mine." (Bu siyah kalem kimin?/Bu siyah kalem benim.) OK so that's two new things but you get the idea.
2. Demonstrate I then use mostly TQ Invisible Friend to demonstrate each side of the conversation (ideally TQ Comedy Duo with my strongest student if I'm sure she'll know what to do), of course observing TQ In Threes and getting them to copycat. I will often interrupt to use TQ Sing-along Song for individual sentences or even words I can see them having trouble with. If they still haven't got it after the third demonstration I keep going until they're close enough (TQ Mumble).
3. Play I then start with the student who's next to me, or at least make sure it goes round so that the weakest student does it last. In the first round I repeat the conversation with her three times, and then signal that she should hold the same conversation with the person next to her. After it gets back round to me, we go around again but this time twice each. In the third round we just do the conversation once before moving on, and by this stage they've usually got it straight off the bat.
Then I move on to the next chunk, mixing and matching from material in the ride to get something with just one or two new things. Especially if the "new thing" from the previous chunk was a grammatical concept, I find it's good to cycle through the objects thus repeating that new concept four times until it sticks. This is especially important for suffixes.
I think next time I'm going to introduce a "free practice round", just have a round of asking anyone anything about what they have based on this week's material...
So that's where we're at so far.
I've duplicated the Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum on the official wiki over onto fethiyewayk.wikia.com. I won't be creating many new pages as I go forward, so I'll be able to update the official wiki now and again.
A lot of the material is now different after having undergone a number of tweaks. For now I'm just going to go through the pattern I've established that seems to be working well and update the material as I find the time.
When starting, I labour the concept of TQ Copycatting. It very quickly becomes necessary to point out that only people who aren't in the conversation copycat. So when you're the one being asked a question you don't copycat the person asking the question.
TQ How Fascinating is a toughie. Saying, "When we make a mistake we all throw up our arms and say 'How Fascinating'", is a bit counterproductive with retiree Brits. But I still think I'm honouring the spirit by calling "How Fascinating" all the time without calling it that. Lots of TQ Pull You Though It, lots of "No, that was fine!" and lots of laughs, backed up with a pep talk now and then that we're playing a game and having fun, not "learning" or sitting an exam. In the sense of keeping it light and fun, How Fascinating is certainly up there with TQ Signing as one of the absolutely indispensable concepts of the method.
Getting them to avoid speaking English during the lesson is next to impossible sometimes. "Oh what was it, bu, er, siyat kalem, oh no, sorry, siyah kalem, yeah see I keep getting that wrong, was that right, siyah kalem?" etc. Now and again I remind them to make the "timeout" sign if they want to ask something in English, and then just make the sign sometimes when they forget. But I find it's not worth making a big thing of it if it will break the mood, especially when you've barely got them to stop thinking of it as a lesson.
I've also gotten my head around the fact that TQ Killing Faeries is of course good and necessary, but this does not extend to explaining game mechanics. The difference between "I'm going to say what is this, and you're going to say 'It's a...'" and "We're going to say it twice this time round."
Now to the pattern
For each bitesize chunk, I'm following this procedure:
1. Select chunk Although a "Ride" in the Universal Speed Curriculum can be around a dozen lines long, I've discovered the hard way that the ideal size for a bitesize chunk is 4 lines, you-me-you-me. Anything longer is just too much, no matter how familiar the material.
So the ideal chunk is 4 lines long, containing mostly familiar material and focusing on just one new "thing" (TQ Limit). So, for instance, if they already know "What is this?/This is a black pen." (Bu ne?/Bu siyah kalem.) then I might introduce "Whose is this black pen?/This black pen is mine." (Bu siyah kalem kimin?/Bu siyah kalem benim.) OK so that's two new things but you get the idea.
2. Demonstrate I then use mostly TQ Invisible Friend to demonstrate each side of the conversation (ideally TQ Comedy Duo with my strongest student if I'm sure she'll know what to do), of course observing TQ In Threes and getting them to copycat. I will often interrupt to use TQ Sing-along Song for individual sentences or even words I can see them having trouble with. If they still haven't got it after the third demonstration I keep going until they're close enough (TQ Mumble).
3. Play I then start with the student who's next to me, or at least make sure it goes round so that the weakest student does it last. In the first round I repeat the conversation with her three times, and then signal that she should hold the same conversation with the person next to her. After it gets back round to me, we go around again but this time twice each. In the third round we just do the conversation once before moving on, and by this stage they've usually got it straight off the bat.
Then I move on to the next chunk, mixing and matching from material in the ride to get something with just one or two new things. Especially if the "new thing" from the previous chunk was a grammatical concept, I find it's good to cycle through the objects thus repeating that new concept four times until it sticks. This is especially important for suffixes.
I think next time I'm going to introduce a "free practice round", just have a round of asking anyone anything about what they have based on this week's material...
So that's where we're at so far.
Saturday, 8 March 2014
Suffixes and sign language
I recently had two of my students decide against continuing with WAYK. After talking it over with Ben Barrett, who is always a great help, I have concluded that my main problems were, firstly, trying to pitch a beginner's class to halfway intermediates (an issue I will come back to later), and secondly signing all the suffixes.
I had always seen the signing aspect of WAYK as useful. It serves as a both a memory aid for new vocabulary and for making the whole experience more "tactile" and therefore more memorable. It also serves as a way of marking the various elements of a sentence to make sure that phrases enter the memory as "sums of parts" and not simply unparsed wholes. Basically this is what is meant when they talk about a bridge language.
But in hindsight it seems the idea of mapping all elements of the spoken language to sign language is not only impossible but undesirable, as it creates unnecessary complexity. One of my students in particular complained about the "hand signals" from the beginning saying she "wasn't very dexterous", and I could see that most of her brain's bandwidth was indeed being spent on getting her hands around the signs.
I didn't help things by signing all the suffixes religiously. I think it was particularly difficult where I was signing suffixes that were part of a syllable. To give you an example, just watch this little snippet from our last session.
I'm saying Bu senin şişen mi? which translates as "Is this your bottle?" The sign language is going like this:
I think this much is clear: Never, ever sign half a syllable.
With this possessive suffix "-n", it does actually form an independent syllable with words that end in a consonant, like kalem which becomes kalemin and telefon which becomes telefonun. So the question is: Was my mistake not starting out with words that ended in consonants, and would therefore give me a whole-syllable suffix to sign, or is signing suffixes at all a mistake?
After talking to Ben, I'm currently leaning towards the latter. He has taught Japanese, which is also a highly agglutinative language, without signing the suffixes and with no problems, relying on the Obvious Set-up to do the magic for him. However he also suggested radically revising the target conversation entirely to use as few suffixes as possible starting out, completely eliminating "mine, yours" for the first five or six sessions and instead opting for sentences without suffixes, based more around "this, that".
Ultimately we come back to the fundamental principle of a Limited Obvious Set-up. We use sign language for all the reasons listed above and also because it makes the Set-up more Obvious. Where sign language will complicate things (as in complicated suffixes), first check to see if your Set-up is Obvious enough to do without it. If things are still too complicated, it's time to Limit some more, and go back to the drawing board if you have to.
All sign language is eventually phased out anyway. If I can get away without sign language for suffixes, I will. Where I do feel the need to use sign language for suffixes, I'm going to be careful to make sure I engineer my conversation so those suffixes are in whole-syllable forms, but abandon them just as soon as my students are used to them.
It's not all bad news, my original student is still keeping at it and I will hopefully have a second starting afresh. Meanwhile, things have been going well on the English front, with our first formal beginners session this evening.
To paraphrase Will Smith, it is no longer our job to get them to like the method. It is our job not to mess it up!
Edit: See Suffixes and sign language revisited
I didn't help things by signing all the suffixes religiously. I think it was particularly difficult where I was signing suffixes that were part of a syllable. To give you an example, just watch this little snippet from our last session.
I'm saying Bu senin şişen mi? which translates as "Is this your bottle?" The sign language is going like this:
| Bu | senin | şişe | -n | mi? |
| THIS | YOUR | BOTTLE | YOUR | QUESTION |
I think this much is clear: Never, ever sign half a syllable.
With this possessive suffix "-n", it does actually form an independent syllable with words that end in a consonant, like kalem which becomes kalemin and telefon which becomes telefonun. So the question is: Was my mistake not starting out with words that ended in consonants, and would therefore give me a whole-syllable suffix to sign, or is signing suffixes at all a mistake?
After talking to Ben, I'm currently leaning towards the latter. He has taught Japanese, which is also a highly agglutinative language, without signing the suffixes and with no problems, relying on the Obvious Set-up to do the magic for him. However he also suggested radically revising the target conversation entirely to use as few suffixes as possible starting out, completely eliminating "mine, yours" for the first five or six sessions and instead opting for sentences without suffixes, based more around "this, that".
Ultimately we come back to the fundamental principle of a Limited Obvious Set-up. We use sign language for all the reasons listed above and also because it makes the Set-up more Obvious. Where sign language will complicate things (as in complicated suffixes), first check to see if your Set-up is Obvious enough to do without it. If things are still too complicated, it's time to Limit some more, and go back to the drawing board if you have to.
All sign language is eventually phased out anyway. If I can get away without sign language for suffixes, I will. Where I do feel the need to use sign language for suffixes, I'm going to be careful to make sure I engineer my conversation so those suffixes are in whole-syllable forms, but abandon them just as soon as my students are used to them.
It's not all bad news, my original student is still keeping at it and I will hopefully have a second starting afresh. Meanwhile, things have been going well on the English front, with our first formal beginners session this evening.
To paraphrase Will Smith, it is no longer our job to get them to like the method. It is our job not to mess it up!
Edit: See Suffixes and sign language revisited
Monday, 17 February 2014
Turkish Session Diary 1
Today we had our third formal session with our first student, and two more joined us for the first time. All three have some Turkish vocabulary, so they're not starting from scratch. Still, getting used to signing and speaking at the same time is proving difficult. I've assured them that the signs will both fix the words in their memories and help them to truly grasp the grammar, and they're still with me so far. As the signs started to sink in I think they could see a way to them being helpful.
I've uploaded a video to Youtube of the Mine/Yours part of the lesson. They weren't so keen on me filming them, but they didn't mind so long as I filmed myself.
I am still feeling my way with introducing new material and making it digestible for newcomers, but they've been very patient with me and I am improving. One of the main things I keep having to remind myself to do is slow down with the signs, which is somewhat difficult when you're signing suffixes. But I'm sure it will work out. Our third-time student was as active as I was in persuading the newcomers that they would get used to the system and find it helpful.
I am still feeling my way with introducing new material and making it digestible for newcomers, but they've been very patient with me and I am improving. One of the main things I keep having to remind myself to do is slow down with the signs, which is somewhat difficult when you're signing suffixes. But I'm sure it will work out. Our third-time student was as active as I was in persuading the newcomers that they would get used to the system and find it helpful.
So that's Parts 1-3 of the USC in a single two-hour session, but of course that's with people who already have a decent vocabulary. Still not bad!
Edit: Please see my next post.
Edit: Please see my next post.
Saturday, 15 February 2014
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.
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
The journey to fluency
It turns out that I could have avoided a lot of my previous stress about how far WAYK can really take you by going over to Vimeo and digging a little deeper into the Where Are Your Keys? video archive.
Below is a series of videos charting Sky Hopinka's progress as Evan Gardner uses WAYK to teach him Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon). I think that anyone interested in using the system would be best advised to go through at least some of the Top 20 WAYK Techniques and then watch these videos.
- Introduction. I think this is Evan's best introduction to the WAYK system I've seen so far, even than the vintage 2006 video featured on the main page of the official site, most probably because it's had five years of refinement.
- Part 1. Evan goes into some detail on the basic techniques and philosophy of the system.
- Part 2. They get up to "Mine/Yours". Evan explains the logic behind "How Fascinating".
- Part 3. Want/Have/Give/Take.
- Part 4. Now into a separate session, Evan explains "Travels with Charlie".
- Part 5. Want/Have/Give/Take is reviewed from the previous session.
- Part 6. Evan explains "Full". They progress into trading with money, and Evan "lets the fairies live" by teaching new words by implication instead of explaining them in English.
- Part 7. Trade/Steal/Buy.
- 18 months later... Evan and Sky have an advanced-level conversation 18 months after Evan first met Sky.
Other videos of interest:
- Where Are Your Keys: Mandarin Chinese lets you be a fly on the wall for another lively initiation, this time led by David Edwards. The August 22, 2009 Albuquerque Workshop is also very useful to get a feel for how it's done if you're getting started
- Advanced WAYK: Mandarin Push/Pull together with Advanced WAYK: Spanish Push/Pull give a bit more detail on how hunting works at advanced stages.
- Chinuk Wawa Language Night. This is the only video I've seen subtitled so far, and gives you a fairly clear idea of how a WAYK group works in practice.
Sunday, 9 February 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 February 2014
Resources
The other day I found a real gem: "The Most Commonly Used 1,200 Words in Turkish to Be Taught to Children Aged 0-6", which, of course, is in Turkish although there is an English abstract. My game plan at the moment is to build up a course that includes all these words, then the idea is we'll have a tangible end result, a package, to offer prospective students.
Another online resource that I'm sure we will be referring to often is the "Spread the Sign" international sign language dictionary. As an agglutinative language (suffixes galore) Turkish bears little relation to Turkish Sign Language, and the logic behind some signs is only apparent to those who already speak Turkish. For instance, for "need" you sign the letter "l" in lazım (you can check on the site). How imaginative. We'll be going with the Indian one, which is much more expressive.
Another online resource that I'm sure we will be referring to often is the "Spread the Sign" international sign language dictionary. As an agglutinative language (suffixes galore) Turkish bears little relation to Turkish Sign Language, and the logic behind some signs is only apparent to those who already speak Turkish. For instance, for "need" you sign the letter "l" in lazım (you can check on the site). How imaginative. We'll be going with the Indian one, which is much more expressive.
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