Spring 2005

Online teaching & learning

There's more to languages than words

When you understand how we all learn to speak in the first place, it is easy to see why computer resources work so well for foreign language learners. JOE LO BIANCO clarifies the principles of language acquisition and analyses how they have contributed to the design of learning objects for Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian.

WHEN LEARNING ITS MOTHER TONGUE a child is at the centre of attention, in a many-to-one dynamic. People are always talking to the child, well before it even knows what talking is. This linguistic input comes from a large number of people; intimates as well as strangers, adults as well as children. They make meaning clear to the child, often ‘teaching’ the language by attaching form to meaning, labelling things and showing relationships and actions. Importantly, whatever communication the child makes is accepted. When a child says ‘sheeps’ no one replies: ‘No darling, not sheeps! It’s sheep! It’s a rare noun with an invariate plural form’. Whatever the child communicates (in gestures, proto-language, one or two word utterances) the interlocutor attends to the message, sometimes supplying correct forms as a model, sometimes delighting in errors.

In these ways the child’s sense of the purposeful connection between sounds and meanings, such as manipulating the behaviour of others, is an emergent hypothesis about the functionality of speech.

Increasingly, this is modulated for culture—adapted for particular groups of interlocutors (parents, siblings, doctors, gardeners, native strangers, foreigners). Through this process of interactive refinement, informed by intention and effect, the child develops a naturalised association between the verbal mode and ‘society’. Essentially, children are immersed in ‘long turns’—extended sequences of language doing real things in the social world for reasons that count.

The many-to-one format provides input all day, everyday, in every imaginable situation, learning what is correct and what is appropriate from the modelled norms. Some children undergo this process in more than one language, and are primary bilinguals. It is likely that nothing else we learn in life is so momentous in its consequences as our primary language or languages.

Foreign languages

However, for many young Australians a second language is really a ‘school’ experience, and therefore a ‘schooled’ language. When we learn foreign languages, many of the propitious conditions of child language acquisition are not only absent, some are reversed. Instead of many-to-one, providing continual and diverse input, there is one-to-many—one source of input (teacher), to many learners (students), on behalf of an absent party (native speakers), for fixed sessions (lessons). The provider is neither an intimate, nor a stranger, but a professional. New behaviours demanding sharing of time, space and attention with age peers are also expected, often the first such ‘horizontal’ experience for children. The child is schooled as much as the language. Critically, the linguistic input is compartmentalised, infrequent, directed at a mass audience, rarely generated by specific and immediate needs or interests. Foreign language learners already have a language and it has done formative work on their cognition, personality and cultural norms. Our first language has not only named our world, it has constituted it intellectually and culturally for us.

In short, foreign languages are contained and constrained. Individual learners are restricted to ‘short turns’, brief and often pre-scripted. Not surprisingly, while every child learns their first language natively, most students fail to gain proficiency in foreign languages.

Digital possibilities

The digital domain reproduces aspects of naturalistic first language learning, thereby offering engagement; and potential interactivity, thereby offering more authentic intercultural encounters. The design basis of Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese learning objects (LOs) aims to capitalise on this potential.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, language teaching has always been about culture, and the digital domain offers intriguing possibilities for making foreign language encounters a little more like first-language encounters.

Multimedia activities can increase a learner’s encounter with authentic voices and situations via multidirectional talking. Authentic everyday interactions of native speakers are always infused with cultural assumptions and practices. In the LOs some naturalistic encounters are dramatised or reproduced, with scaffolding provided to the user’s participation.

When we learn a second language, we learn sociocultural norms alongside grammatical rules, vocabulary and other linguistic items. These are essential for effective communication, even at the earliest stages.

Cultures of speaking

When is it inappropriate to speak, or to speak loudly; when is it too much, and with whom? This tiny selection of the culturally expected patterns of conversation is already a lot. Relating to other people is perhaps the single greatest task of language. Turn-taking rules in conversation, interruption, overlapping, expression of deference or opinion, hesitation or assertion, and various kinds of message and politeness signalling are important for effective inter-personal relations. What you can disclose about yourself or others, and how and to whom, we know more or less well for most of our native culture, and how to inflect this knowledge for young and old, male and female, high and low positioned, intimate and stranger, rival and friend. These all influence how agreements are reached and disagreement managed or repaired.

Low verbosity cultures tolerate silence; high verbosity cultures interpret it negatively. Like in all societies Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese speakers deploy a complex range of precise pragmatic values enacted by the use of different linguistic forms. These can involve use of physical space; terms of address encoding social distinctions in pronouns and in many other grammatical markers; and titles and honorifics according to age, familiarity, professional seniority, gender and for varying purposes or ends.

In some societies there is normalised marking of social stratification, while in Australian English we typically express and idealise relations of presumed equality and inter-personal proximity. We can call a complete stranger Schapelle or Douglas on the television news. While Australian English has a restricted set of hierarchy and status markers, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese have a more extensive range. Feelings and emotions are displayed and negotiated in different cultures in significantly different ways. The social histories of societies are expressed in their modes of talk and their preferred ways to govern social relations. Japanese communication style emphasises omoiyari (empathy), a social convention that precludes overt conflict, often realised as indirectness functioning to forestall conflict.

A multimedia dramatisation can create an intensive encounter with such notions, allowing for trial and error, practice and modelling, to move individuals at a personalised pace towards achieving more effective control of these aspects of cultureinfused communication in a foreign language.

The Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese LOs are guided by a sense that we can reproduce naturalistic language and therefore recover some of the features of successful language learning, and that learners can meet speakers of Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in encounters where we can model key rules and patterns of communication culture. The LOs aim to help the learner develop a ‘personal voice’, a correct and standard way of using these languages but one which acknowledges them as learners, already formed with their own communicative skills and practices. A personal voice is a mechanism for a secure personal and cultural identity as a learner also gathers the skills to become a bicultural and bilingual individual.

Students learn to compare and contrast cultural differences in awareness raising activities, and to experiment in a scaffolded way so that making mistakes is a learning experience. They receive feedback and are guided to use Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese to be effective in situations that are common in these societies, but sometimes challenging for the learner.

Joseph Lo Bianco holds the Chair of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au