AIM

Here is what I wrote as part of an assignment about an alternative French Teaching Program that interested me to the point that I plan to go and work as a volunteer in the only such class in Windsor, Ontario, Canada for a month.

The Accelerative Integrated Method (AIM) is a method of teaching French as a second language that exceeds the curriculum expectations of this subject in public schools. The main idea of AIM is to reinforce learning of the language through visual support (the use of gestures), story-based lessons, inductive grammar, creative writing, scaffold reading, music, drama and dance. It ingrains in the students the seven hundred essential words they need to function in the language. Some of the gestures are based on American Sign Language (ASL). The teaching of the grammar is inductive and is based on using complete sentences. It begins simple, using only the singular pronouns and is mostly verb-based.

The visualization of words through gestures instils them in the children’s mind by forming mental images. The big picture books with their scaffolded exercise books are followed by drama-based activities. The incidental learning of the grammar happens when the teacher encourages the class to model a complete sentence for a student who has just failed to relay a certain point in French. The whole class creative writing is scaffolded by the teacher’s guidance. It not only stimulates the student’s creative thinking but also encourages them to probe their inventory of words and reuse them in a new content and therefore increase their learning of both words and grammar. There is lots of dancing and music involved. The music mostly supports the grammar taught and sometimes is used as a motivational tool. The assessment is done through marking the exercise books and the follow-up activities like story writing or reading comprehension exercises. There are no tests in this method. The fact that the miming is in itself another sign language might be a factor in the students’ successful learning experience. They are actually learning two languages with the same grammar-base at the same time. So one could reinforce another and vice versa. I have also noticed that only the major words are emphasized on through specific gesticulations. This is important in the process of leaning when it only supports the production of language without making students totally dependant on the gestures.

In general the AIM activities all complete each other’s educational outcome by integrating the four areas of language learning: reading, writing, listening and speaking and even exceeding them. To fulfill its promise, the AIM program adopts a variety of supplementary materials from overhead projector to Smart Board, Microsoft word processor, educational CDs and DVDs, big books and more.

The AIM classes are lively, active and motivational. Almost all students are involved in the process of learning. There are less behavioural problems in these classes and students generally enjoy learning French.

My language experience-Entry One

I remember my first serious classes in English as an adult. They had put me in the very beginners class despite my moderate knowledge of the language since I was a language student at university too. So the information taught was too easy for me. But I remember I was so motivated to learn more and do it as soon as possible that from the very first classes I began to make everything relevant to my learning and looked for words that I did not know in English from the corner pictures of the book or the foot prints to the furniture of the class and the words the teacher used or the gestures she made, I tried to find their equivalents in English. Later on I started taking notes from the teacher's instructions and felt great joy whenever I could land a new word from her speech. When others contented themselves with what the book or the teacher taught, I strove to find the meanings of the words in an English-English dictionary where from my own volition decided to learn the new terms I came across in the definition of the new concepts as well. I had made it a habit to learn the recent expressions in full sentences by either improvising or copying their usage examples from the dictionary or the text itself. I had pinned half page squared papers in between the pages of my book on which I kept endless records of added locutions with their meanings and citations and the new designations found in the definitions of the current words themselves. Some times I would use up pages before I am done with a single fresh utterance! Through the book I have used many such papers for anecdotal simple back and forth dialogues between my teacher and myself or one of the students using an original word order that sounded interesting to me and which I intended to learn and use. In my more advance classes where the teacher deliberately started the class with small talk and where most of other students were shy or not prepared to talk or would not think of anything to say, I would have prepared and memorized jokes and anecdotes from my favorite hard-to-reach magazine (because foreign magazines were scarce back then in Iran and I believe they still are) : "Reader's Digest". I did not care if they are amusing or if anybody laughs at the punch lines which for the most part were not what as Iranians we were used to since it came from a totally different culture. In that class, I recall I had a very fastidious rival who would start the class by her nugatory scuttlebutt to which only the male teacher would listen with pretentious interest that was in fact directed towards her charms as a very young, made up and flirtatious girl. I particularly remember this episode of my class when after a couple of such insipid class starter yarns the teacher very bluntly asked me and surprisingly not her, a favour not to tell any more of these chestnuts for which I got a bit disappointed. Instead of losing hope, I started to think of other stories like what had happened to me during my absence from the class and most importantly I would prepare for it so I could ask questions about the tidings for which I had not found a correspondent in English. To this day I regret why I did not report his discriminatory behavior to the manager of the institute. In spite of all the adversaries from the lack of adequate number of English magazines to such unfair teachers and institute managers who only thought of their own profits when they put me in a beginner class despite my adequate knowledge to start off a bit further on the scale; I am proud of my perseverance and creativity and ingenuity in coming up with ways to increase my vocabulary and my flexibility in using different structures of the language. I want to possibly surprise the readers of this blog by asserting that I have written this piece by constantly consulting the online thesaurus and google searching for additional expressions of the terms I already knew to avoid repetition and to still learn dewy words and phrases. I am proud of this too! This self-regulated, lifelong learning of the languages!

This piece was the first in my recent series of self-given assignments which I like to continue through the guidance I get from the end of each chapter of : "Principles of learning and teaching."

Back on Track!

Well, I have passed the French test and I can go back to reading and writing on language learning. I have read and studied this book years ago on my fourth year of studying English language and literature, during a "Language Teaching" course. I remember how excited and surprised I was when reading the chapter on the characteristics of a good language learner realizing I had almost all those attributes and I was following the rule of thumb. Now that I am reading this fifth edition, which includes the new theories on language learning, I am thinking to capitalize on these new theories in my book on best language learning strategies which is also going to be based on my experience in language learning.

What I like the most about this book and am going to benefit from is the end of each chapter which is dedicated to three subsequent sections: questions for study, suggested reading and journal entry the last of which is just the kind of gem I am looking for. This part is going to help me shape my thoughts and my experiences in language learning in accordance with each new topic and theories I learn about in the foregoing chapter and write them down in a journal type entry possibly in this blog. I am sure it could facilitate the process of writing my book to a great extent, since finally I can make more sense of all that have been going on in my mind whenever I think about my strategies during the years learning French and English.

Right now I have opened a file in my computer for a while in which I have determined roughly the major sections of my book and have contributed to some chapters every now and then when I have remembered a strategy or two. I have also written a kind of a foreword or introduction in a moment of sheer passion and belief in what I am going to do! But I have not had a serious plan. Since I have started reading this book and finding about the excellent section at the end of each chapter, I have come to the conclusion that it is about time to get more serious on this and work more vigorously and according to a plan.

Now that I come to think of it, I knew that I need exactly this book to boost me forward on this path, because the author and I had some common grounds on the best strategies to use in learning a new language!

...

I am studying hard for this upcoming French test. So I won't be able to read and therefore write in here, for at least one more week.

"Mind Design"

The last chapter of Steven Pinker's "valuable" book; deals with how some of the major social sciences have based their recent theories on what Pinker has introduced as the brain's ability to produce language through an innate "mind design".

Margaret Mead, anthropologist and John Watson, psychologist are the two founders of the "Standard Social Science Model" (SSSM) which asserts that the human nature is changeable to different personalities through social upbringing. Pinker in fact sets forth a more coherent version of such model suggesting that at the beginning heredity builds an "innate psychological mechanisms" such as "learning mechanisms". Meanwhile the "environment" provides input for this hereditary innate system. The interface between the environment and these innate mechanisms results in the human behavior. It also helps humans develop skills and values and access the knowledge.

A recent alternative to SSSM is the "Integrated Causal Model" in which some psychologists or anthropologists embark on the evolution theory to form their own science-related hypothesis. For example, Tooby and Cosmides pioneered the "psychological foundations of culture". This "evolutionary psychology" announces the emergence of brain as a result of evolution. The brain in turn produces the psychological processes such as knowing and learning. These two developments in the human psyche lead to the acquisition of "values and knowledge" which make up a person's culture.

Computational linguists like Ray Jackendoff have used this substitute model to enhance this part of the language science.

Pinker believes that the "evolutional psychology" takes its lessons from human language. The psychology that is based on the evolution considers the existence of mental softwares for reasoning and perception and supposes that some "innate mechanism" involves that makes the learning happen when it works at cross-purposes through different modules each with provisions to learn in its own way. Like the languages, these mental mechanisms in turn have evolved from the "natural selection"; but not all aspects of mind are adaptations. The mind's adaptations are not necessarily beneficial in the evolutionary novel environments like the twenthieth-century cities.

Just like how the languages have spread among humans through the years; particular kinds of learning have contagiously spread in a community and the minds of people have become coordinated into shared patterns to form a certain culture.

Meta Culture is a Universal Pattern shared by all human beings. An example of an innate module is "folk biology" in which humans are believed to be born with basic intuitions about plants and animals. According to this module, stone-age people were both botanists and zoologists who had special instincts about living things that began early in life.

The question is how the difference in the biochemistry of people helps the natural selection and consequently the evolution?

The Language Evolution

The next chapter of Language Instinct is about how the language evolved. It sets forth questions answered in detail, through this part of the book. Pinker believes that language evolved gradually in what he calls "a sequence of intermediate forms" which were useful for its possessor's survival.

Who the first "grammar mutants" interacted with, What an intermediate form of language looks like, and how these intermediate language's evolution provided the survival means for the human being; are the three questions asked and answered by Pinker.

There are two possibilities for the answer to the first question:

1) The first men could have used their language instinct to communicate with the family members who inherited the same gene and instinct.

2) They could have talked with their neighbors who despite the lack of the "new fangled circuitry" understood them using the "overall intelligence". An example of the use of the mental ability and background knowledge to appreciate a language is when native speakers of English intuitively grasp the gist of the news on an Italian newspaper with the additional mercy of common words in both the languages.

The effort these neighbors took to decode the language of their cohabitants led to such ability being wired in their brains by the "natural selection".

The answer to the second question-the possible structure of an intermediate grammar-would be some kind of "grammar with intermediate complexity" in which for example"symbols would have a narrower range, rules would be less reliably applied or modules would have fewer rules". This language would look something like the"protolanguage of the chimps signing, pidgings, child language in the two-word stage, the language of immigrants and the unsuccessful partial language of Genie and other wolf-children learned after puberty".

Here, I came up with a question myself: If the intermediate language looks like the language of the immigrants and if the language evolves; does this mean that the spread of immigrants in a country and the use of their language is going to change or deteriorate the use of the native language of the country in which they live now? Or on another level is it possible that the desperate need to learn a second language for survival after the puberty change the "critical period" by "natural selection"? Later Pinker hints that living in the modern times and having everything needed for survival at hand, the humans have ceased to evolve by natural selection.

The author has found the way out of the third question by providing us with four reasons why the evolution of the human language is not as absurd as one might think:

1) We need to know that the small advantages will do for the natural selection to take place. For example a natural selection rule in a mouse that changes its size by one percent each generation will result in a mouse the size of an elephant by a few thousand generations. The author apparently fails to explain clearly how this works in the language evolution. Though, one might guess that a coined word or a change in a word order at a time would lead to what we see as language today.

2) Using the language to trade hard-won knowledge (biology, crafts, tools, ecology, animal and plants' behavior with kin and friends makes a big difference in conveying the "exact message" through more complex grammar. This conveyance of knowledge of the environment, tools, animals and so on serves as a fitness enhancer and therefor leads to better survival of the human race.

3) Using the language for "cooperative efforts for survival" like forming alliances and exchanging information and commitments could have led to its evolution. In Pinker words:"A cognitive arms race could propel a linguistic one." In other more clear words he explains: " There could easily have been a selection for any edge in the ability to frame an offer so that it appears to present maximal benefit and minimal cost to the negotiating partner and in the ability to see through such endeavors and to formulate attractive counter proposals."

4) According to the anthropologists the tribal chiefs were both "gifted orators" and "highly polygynous". They would have easily and effectively woven the language into the politics, economics, tech, family, sex and friendship which were the key roles in the "individual reproductive success.

Three final learnings

Yesterday I finished this book: How Languages Are Learned and here are the last pieces of information I learned from it:

1. That the best time to have my child srart learning a second language is around the age of 10 when (s)he has already improved gramatically in his/her first language. The question is considering that my husband and I speak persian as our first language living in a country where the first language of people is English; which language would be my child's first?
2. That teachers like parents tend to change the structure of their spoken language intuitively according to the progress their students make in learning the second language. To me, that was an interesting finding.
3. That when teaching a second language, especially in the immersion contexts, teacher's correction of students' errors in the form of "recasts" often is received unnoticed and as part of the conversation. So the teachers should grab the students' attention by indicating directly before the correction what they are going to do; like the following suggested interaction: "I understand what you say, but here is how you can say it better...".