I've been extremely fortunate to know Kumu Kekeha (Hawaiian: teacher Kekeha) at the University of Hawai‘i. We met at a Blaine Ray TPRS® workshop about four years ago. Years later, Kekeha invited me to present a similar comprehension-based, beginner-level teaching workshop for his graduate course, Teaching Hawaiian as a Second Language. Cut to present day: we have agreed to do a trade-off: I sit in on his Hawaiian 101 classes in exchange for emailing him notes about his teaching and how he can continue to help his beginning learners. I'm gaining a lot in terms of language comprehension, word and grammar familiarity, and local culture and history. I'm also seeing Kekeha make leaps and bounds in his ability to use the language comprehensibly with everyone in the class--a mix of heritage and beginning learners. I see people around the room show that they comprehend through responding with words, head nods, and laughter. Now, just a month into the course, the slowest learners are beginning to respond in full sentences on their own. Kekeha and his colleague, Ka‘iuokalani, spend time after class on Fridays to talk shop about teaching. I brought up one one of the features of Kekeha's style of speech during class that took me many weeks to begin to parse for myself: his natural, razor fast fluency. I gave an example in Chinese of how I would write and gloss my words on the board on the first day, and how I would talk in a slow and segmented manner, as I pause and point. I do this at the start because day-1 beginning learners typically don't have the implicit (unconscious) phonological (sound) and lexical (word) knowledge to parse the teacher's speech stream on their own yet. I showed Kekeha and Ka‘iuokalani how different it feels as a total beginner in a new language to have the teacher parse the sentences for them. Kekeha expressed how much mental work it is for the teacher to keep track of all of these micro-skills at once. I responded: "Teachers needs to chew the food for beginning language learner because these baby birds aren't developmentally ready to do it for themselves." We laughed about the metaphor--it's a little gross, to be sure. Whatever a teacher says about fast speech being more helpful in the long-run, I've never met a teacher who was comfortable hearing fast speech during a day-1 demo in Chinese, Vietnamese, or Hebrew. More data is needed to compare effects from the two kinds of experience--immediate effects on learning from fast versus slow speech from teachers during the first days of classroom interaction, and the long-term effects as well. What I have seen over and over is this: beginning learners show they don't understand fast speech, and they then struggle to use the language in any kind of productive task after the lesson. Conversely, learners who experienced slow, segmented speech do show comprehension during the lesson, and show greater confidence and fluency in using the language after just that first demo lesson. For beginning learners, I identify slow and segmented speech as a higher-leverage teaching practice (stronger outcomes toward a desired learning goal given one teaching practice over another in a given period of time). I decided a quick internet search on the names and descriptions of real juvenile birds might provide a useful model to help language teachers see how we help our beginning learners, largely toward keeping them confident in their abilities to comprehend and interact in the target language*:
necessary for flight or independent activity, also: to leave the nest after acquiring such feathers"
Note that not all learners need to show outward signs of talking to progress in each of these stages. It is common in comprehension-based communicative classrooms to see learners who almost never speak to suddenly start talking in full, creative sentences. An observant teacher can often see who is struggling to process in the normal non-verbal cues the students give in response during classroom interaction, or on free-speaking assessments (e.g. "say as much as you can about this picture," or "narrate a story from this series of pictures"). *There is already good research on input and song practice in song birds (for example, here), but that is beyond the purpose of this post. The focus here is on a metaphor teachers can use to treat beginning learners differently across early stages of language development. **I found all bird terms and descriptions here, except for the term, 'brancher', which I found here.
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Reed Riggs (Author)
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