The illusion of mastery

 Do you ever get your classes to chant or sing verb conjugations or endings? Later in my career, I certainly did, influenced by colleagues, and seeing that pupils enjoyed singing verb paradigms to tunes. My favourite was singing the present tense of the verb ‘aller’ to the Mission Impossible theme. The Pink Panther was good for some verbs too.

In the same vein, I was happy for students to enter the class singing the alphabet to a US marching melody. It was an upbeat, organised start to beginner lessons.

Why did I do these things? Was there value in them?

First, let me remind you of something from cognitive science. It's the TAP effect. TAP stands for Transfer-Appropriate Processing. It’s the idea that when we encode a memory of something we learn, we also encode the context of the learning. For instance, if you teach the phrase ‘I have a headache’ along with a gesture, the student will encode both the language and the gesture.

It has been found that when you later ask a student to retrieve the learned item, they will do so better if you supply the same context, for example the headache gesture. In the jargon this is called ‘cue-dependent’ remembering. Conversely, if you don’t supply the extra cue (the headache gesture), you get ‘cue-dependent forgetting’.

So, back to our verb chanting… Pupils will happily be able to sing your verb over and over, but if you ask them to later recite the verb with no tune, they will find it a bit harder. Same thing for the alphabet minus melody. And if course it’s a big leap from reciting the alphabet to actually spelling out a word.

Therefore, we can say that the mastery of the sung verb paradigm or alphabet is not transferable to (much more useful) contexts. This is why I call it an illusion of mastery. The mastered task has little application. Taken a bit further, we are happy when students correctly do fill in the blanks tasks accurately, do a verb drill, spell a word correctly, or explain a grammar rule, but disappointed when they can’t apply this knowledge to spontaneous speech and writing.

The TAP effect would appear to suggest that if we want students to retrieve language in actual communicative contexts, then we should supply those contexts in the first place. If we want students to use connected up language to communicate, we should use as much connected up (chunked) language as possible in the classroom. We get better at what we practise.

Does this mean ‘Down with word lists! Down with teaching isolated words from flashcards! Down with all gap-fills!’ Not really, because of course we know that with beginners especially, we have to supply and practise a repertoire of basic language to get them to a point where they can communicate in sentences. So no problem with teaching, say, clothes, food and animals through isolated words and images. Those pictures may well make the vocab more memorable. But I would suggest that wherever those individual words can be put in chunks, try doing so.

For example, when teaching a themed set of words like pets or animals, why not almost immediately put them in phrases such as ‘I like dogs’, ‘Do you have a dog?’ ‘I have a dog called Freddie.’ Then do a structured communicative task such as a class survey about pets. This immediately puts the vocab in a communicative context and provides input which may be more easily retrieved later (TAP).

Of course, I may be preaching to the converted here! I think it’s worth emphasising the point though. This is why, when I work with trainee teachers, I warn them about the limitations of a ‘words + grammar’ approach to language teaching. By this I mean an approach based on the idea that to learn a language we need to memorise words then glue them to other words by using our knowledge of grammar rules. This is not how we acquire our first language(s), nor does it align with what we know about how best to learn new languages.

(Imagine a section about lexicogrammar and chunking here.)

You don’t need TAP to make this point, of course. Centuries of experience tells us that the ‘synthetic’, lego approach to language learning is not the best for students if the goal is communication. Our best bet, given the current state of research - and proper research into second language learning is only around 50 years old - is that to get students to be proficient communicators they need input they understand (‘comprehensible input’), the chance to interact with it, a ton of repetition, some ‘focus on form’ (attention to rules, spelling etc) and a large dose of enjoyment. If we supply these, nature takes its course, implicit learning happens and progress is made with lots of bumps along the way.

In conclusion, does this mean we should abandon singing verbs, chanting the alphabet, memorising individual words? Well… there may yet be something in that limited form of mastery, that ‘illusion of mastery’. If it’s fun, if it makes students happy, if it even helps them later in those moments when they stop and think, probably when writing, ‘What’s the ending here?’. Given those ‘ifs’ you might make a case for those activities with beginners. In the end, that’s why I ended up doing them, even though I rejected them as a younger, more doctrinaire teacher! But you might also ask yourself ‘What is the best use of the limited time we have?’ Whatever you conclude, just be aware of the severe limitations if some types of learning, and TAP.