Demand High and Dogme – brothers in arms or distant cousins?

This post is a summary of the ELTChat of January 16 2013 :

So what there is to be up in arms about?

The ethos behind it is that ELT has become too lightweight, too frivolous and not rigorous enough, as I understand it. @theteacherjames

By emphasizing personalization, DHT is a critique of the ‘environment-building’ ethos of communicative language teaching @baanderson

Teachers doing just for the sake of doing @rosemerebard

In this video, part of a set of materials for a reflective seminar created by Scrivener and Underhill you hear Adrian give his ‘why’ : 

And although #ELTChat could cite many examples where this was not the case, it was agreed that :

having seen lessons on 4 continents last years albeit mainly PLSes rather than mainstream I’ll stand by my ‘I agree’ @Shaunwilden

and further that

Maybe in many places teaching IS about students getting their msg across, even in poor language. DH is reaction to it @Natashetta

and even more

I’d say there’s a culture in FE that militates against Demand High: instead it requires Just Enough @pjgallantry

ELTChat’s reflections included:

It seems to me it’s about asking more from your students, pushing them further & asking them to work harder @theteacherjames

DHT is just probing a bit more and exploiting opportunities for deeper learning & LA @Marisa_C

And importantly it is method agnostic, it is a practice that can be applied however you choose to teach:

it’s about demanding “a better quality” no matter what approach or method you choose @natashetta

DH is “not anti any method, not anti-Communicative Approach, not anti-dogme, not anti-Task Based Learning.” @natashetta

Confirmation that is not a methodology, an approach or a procedure, from the Godfather of DH itself, Jim Scrivener:

DH isn’t a “method”. It’s a small (but possibly needed) course correction. A tweak. @jimscriv

a correction of what?

its an anti plateau device – its pushing that bit harder, driving the learning forward @KerrCarolyn

It’s anti letting the tail wag the dog in my opinion @dalecoulter

What does Demand High look like in practice?  According to #ELTChat:

I would say the DHT comes alive mostly in feedback or exploitation not while Ss are collaborating Marisa_C

actually, my take is that DHELT means interrupting the Ss collaboration to make it more worthwhile @Imadruid

Feedback (not unearned praise) and intervention seem central to Scrivener’s view of DHT @idc74

I think its more like turning a group lesson into 121, with a focus on each individual @KerrCarolyn

Dogme – materials light, free from course-book driven learning, focus on emergent language and conversation driven, in brief @DaleCoulter

letting it all come from the learner and exploiting opportunities for learning as they arise @Marisa_C

exploiting opportunities as thy arise seems to be where the 2 have something in  common – utilising  ‘online’ teaching skills @dalecoulter

Breaking free of routine and automated teaching @idc74

For some they are inseparable:

Dogme without DHELT is like Pedigree Chum without the can opener @Imadruid

for others not so

can a lesson be #Dogme and not #DHElt ..yup. can it be #DHElt and not #Dogme…yup @MrChrisJWilson

One of the ‘greyer’ areas seems to around ‘learner or learning’ centric:

@jimscriv would say that DHELT is more learnING centred than learnER centred? @Imadruid

and indeed, he confirmed:

Being learning centred means you try to find just what is learner doing to do the task. You then help on to next step @jimscriv

So a kind of +1 zone approach? and personalised to that learner? @KerrCarolyn

Yes very much so. The demand is a DOABLE demand for that individual at that moment ie a focused challenge @jimscriv

doable…with help? Similar to Vygotsky’s ZPD – apprentice and expert navigate the waters of learning? @Imadruid

yes and the teacher does not abdicate his/her duty to facilitate learning @jimscriv

And hence the ‘learning’ centeredness? ‘Facilitating Learning’ is the driving force? – Spot on! @jimscriv

The ‘Dogmeticians’ of this world could now jump in and say: ‘yes but this is exactly what the ‘scaffolding’ of Dogme is all about’, and they’d be right, but the fundamental difference is a ‘material’ one:

Getting away from a slight over concern about task, material, fun etc and focussing on the learning @jimscriv

Indeed, the ‘material’ question of ‘To coursebook or not to coursebook’ is key:

The quote put a perspective that coursebook is not the problem,but how how we use coursebook. from what I read, they are in favor of it, just there is more to it @rosemerebard

Well, no. And not just because Dogme isn’t entirely anti- coursebooks, as per Dogme and the Coursebook. There are also structural differences : Dogme has a method, and techniques (as described in Teaching Unplugged  and in the book of the same name). Demand High, however, is not a method. In fact, you can easily argue that ‘Demand High’ is both method and subject agnostic: it could be applied to the teaching of any subject or skill: An engineering professor or high school physics teacher could ask themselves the four key questions of Demand High

Are our learners capable of more, much more?

Have the tasks and techniques we use in class become rituals and ends in themselves?

How can we stop “covering material” and start focusing on the potential for deep learning?

What small tweaks and adjustments can we make to shift the whole focus of our teaching towards getting that engine of learning going?

And aim towards the Demand high outcomes. This is possible precisely because it is method agnostic: it is a way of reflecting that encourages reflection on and adjustment of the techniques already being used by that particular teacher.

Dogme sits in the evolutionary line of Second Language Acquisition, it’s techniques could be applied to the Acquisition of any language. For me it’s immediate evolutionary predecessor was Community Language Learning and that family of methods, where the learners’ experience of the langauge is at the core.

Demand  High sits in the evolutionary line of Modern Educational theory, it’s predecessors are Reflective Practice  and stretch back to the thinking of John Dewey.

So if we take CLL as being the mother of Dogme, who is the father ? Well it can’t be Scott Thornbury, since he had taken a ‘vow of chastity’, but he is clearly the Godfather, guiding Dogme to adulthood. But Scott does give us the clue to its genealogy by referring back to an article which fundamentally influenced his thinking, an article on working in a materials light classroom.

The author of this important article? None other than Adrian Underhill.

Suddenly the family resemblance becomes clearer. Whether directly or indirectly, Adrian Underhill is the common denominator.

@Mk_elt #eltpics – who’s been running naked in the woods?

It makes me wonder who exactly was ‘running naked in the woods’ and what exactly they were up to? (I can’t help but wonder if this famous ‘tongue in cheek’  quote was referring to ‘nakedness’ as an antidote to ‘chastity’)  In any case the offspring are two different but enriching ideas that are pushing Education and Language Acquisition forward:

In my opinion DHT is as valuable as Dogme or any other approach that can enhance learning effectively @toulasklavou

On reading (2): reading in colour

How can reading in colour make it both easier and harder to focus?

In the last post, I looked at reading in terms of human evolution and the brain. The question that has to be asked is ‘so what?’

–       So what if reading is a subset of speaking?

–       So what if you can’t read without hearing the words spoken in your head?

–       So what if you activate the ‘sound production’ brain area when you read silently?

I asked myself these questions in the context of young learners. What does all this mean for ‘reading’ for them? I tend to wait until my young learners are literate in their L1 before I start on readers. Usually after their first year of primary education. So upwards of the age of 7.

Why? Well, so as not to interfere with the tricky process of learning to read. In neurological terms ‘learning to read’ is such a key process: once taught it cannot be untaught or forgotten (except for those unlucky enough to suffer a brain trauma). After learning to read, reading becomes automatic. Something which cannot be switched off.

Proof of this lies in the Stroop test.  The test shows the interference of ‘reading’ in a colour identification activity. All you need to do is look at the words below and identify the ‘ink’ colour of each of the words.

The Stroop Test

I’ve tried this on my nieces and nephews and it does show that the older children who are literate find the task harder then the pre-literate children. They can’t just focus on the colour of the ‘ink’ because they are automatically reading the words. For the 3 year olds the task is easy: there is nothing interfering with their ability to identify the colours.

You can try it with adults using an alphabet and language they know and one they don’t. You’ll notice the same interference.

Stroop in Urdu

Again so what? Well, when I think about my younger learners, I realise that when they see words in English, they are also trying to read them automatically. But they are using their L1 decoding system, with its associated sounds. Without the knowledge of what they words sound like, they quickly become discouraged.

The answer? Books with audio. Easy. My seven and eight year olds are happy to ‘read and listen’ to the stories. I am happy that they are getting extensive comprehensible input and that they are hearing the words they see. (I use the OUP Classic Tales an let YL’s choose their own story).

OUP Classic Tales readers with Audio

But is that enough? I don’t think so. From what I read about the brain, reading also activates the sound formation area: it’s as though as we read we’re preparing to say the words. So is the answer reading aloud?

For me no, (and for some reasons why not and some great insights take a look at this post Is reading allowed, aloud?). I’m a firm believer in the benefits of extensive reading, as described by Krashen in his recent talk at Wired In Wired out (see my ELTChat ‘Homework’ post for links). So I’m interested in helping my young learners become confident and enthusiastic readers and my focus here is on the brain processes they need to read for themselves, not yet in the skills associated with reading aloud.

So if you don’t want to read aloud, but you do want to help with the necessary activation of the ‘sound formation area’ what’s the alternative?

Well, I’ve been trying ‘colour vowels’ and the YLs have really taken to it as a pre-reading activity. We focus on the key story words: nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions and we group them into the  the ‘colour’ of the vowel sound.

Let me explain. One of the first things that children learn and retain are colours. They tend to be able to remember them and pronounce them correctly. This means that they have the ability to produce the sounds that make up those words. The chart below shows 11 colours and their vowel sounds:

11 English Vowels

It’s not all the vowel sounds, but I’ve found its sufficient to start off with. If you map the ‘colour’ vowels onto the Phonemic Chart (this is an adaptation of Adrian Underhill’s British English chart) , you can see that you have enough range to make nearly all the vowel sounds including dipthongs if you combine sounds and legnthen or shorten them. To see this being done in practice watch Adrian Underhill teaching.

The Phonemic Chart overlaid with colour vowels

I came across this colour vowel idea through a British Council presentation by Simon Shepherd (skip forward to 21 minutes for the start)  He gives a really good overview and suggestions for other pronunciation work. The YLs I teach are able to group the words and from there we can play with them in terms of pronuciation and things like rhyming. We play pelamnism both for pairs and sound pairs.

All very nice, but does this help them read? Well it certainly seems to have made them more enthusiastic about it. I sought feedback from the parents to see if doing ‘sound formation’ work had helped with their reading. The parents confirmed that the YL’s seemed more motivated to ‘read and listen’ to their stories, asking for them regumarmy, with an average of around 5 listens per week. I’ve noticed a big improvement in their recall of the language too.

It’s hard to know if it is just the fact that they are able to say the words that is helping them with reading, or making them keener to read, but anything which encourages extensive reading outside of the classroom gets a big multicoloured star in my book.

I will be giving a demonstration of ‘Colour Vowels’ at the TESOL France Workshop on January 19 2013

On reading: how do you read?

How are you reading this? This is not a question of environment or media. Whether you are reading this on a tablet, laptop or smartphone makes no difference to how your brain is processing pixels into words with meanings.

As you are reading try to become aware of what is going on as you process pixels. How fast are you reading? Are you reading whole words or are there any, such as perspicacious, where you look again at the cluster of letters to work out the sounds, to get it clear in your mind?
Another question: ask yourself,

Can I hear my own voice saying the words in my head as I read this?

I’m willing to wager that you can hear your own voice. In fact, I’m willing to wager that you cannot read without hearing the words. Unless you have had a severe hearing impairment since birth it is unlikely that you are capable of reading without hearing.

Why is that? There is a short answer and a longer answer. Historians can provide us with the short answer – it’s because we’ve been speaking for far longer. Reading is a subordinate activity to speaking. Although some people argue that Homo Sapiens has always been able to ‘communicate using sounds’, which would date the capacity to speak as appearing around a million years ago, most historians and linguists put the age of syntactic speech at between forty and sixty thousand years.

Ebih-il Nu Banda, c2340 BCE, Louvre Paris

And what about writing? You can argue that the process of putting pen to paper, or reed to rock, goes back 30 000 to the cave paintings of Southern Europe. But ‘true writing’, a system of coding utterances so that they can be reconstructed as speech by someone else first appeared around 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq. It also appeared independently in China and Mesoamerica, modern day Mexico.

Ebih-il Nu Banda, c 2340 BCE, Louvre, Paris

On the shoulder you can see an example of ‘proto- writing’ – a step from ‘true writing’ where logographs are used to convey words. The next step is to translate the speech sounds, rather than words, to symbols. The earliest form of this is cuneiform, which was originally written by pressing reeds into wet clay to make small angular marks. In this example these are scratches in stone:

Cuneiform Script, c 1500 BCE, Louvre Paris

When symbols represent speech sounds, they can of course be used to code and reconstruct different languages. The example above shows writing in Acadian. Below you can see an early bilingual Acadian Sumerian dictionary, with the two languages both being written using the cuneiform script:

Bilingual Dictionary, c 2000 BCE, Louvre Paris

Cuneiform uses a syllabary: the symbols represent syllables: ba bo bi , ta to ti and so on. Some modern languages still use a syllabary, including Japanese, which uses two. The English language, of course, does not use syllabaries, it uses an alphabet. The next step towards what you are reading here can be seen in the Phoenician alphabet, where the symbols represent consonants, rather than syllables.

1st Millenium BCE, Louvre Paris

It’s easy for us to see the links between Phoenician characters and ours. What looks like a 4 in the middle of this piece of writing will be transformed into A – try looking sideways.

The addition of vowels is the last step to an alphabet. Even if you don’t read Ancient Greek, it’s hard not to pick out the name of the Greek god at the end of this inscription:

Louvre, Paris, Dedication to Dionysus

This brings us back to the present day, to here and now, to the fact that you are ‘hearing’ what you read. For this is what reading is: the reconstruction of scratches, squiggles or pixels into speech sounds, to form words that we understand through hearing them inside our head.

The other development in the ‘hear’ and now is that neuroscientists are able to demonstrate this quite clearly. The technology exists to look inside your head and see what parts of the brain are involved in the reading process. And what it shows is that whether you read aloud or silently you always activate the part of your brain that makes articulated language. It is if you are preparing to say the words that you are reading.

But this has been known for longer than functional MRI scanning has existed. The area of the brain that lights up at the front of the brain is known as Broca’s area, after the work of Paul Broca, the French scientist, active in the middle of the 19^th century.

The other areas that are active are Wernicke’s area, which is involved in the decoding of language and the angular gyrus, which connects sounds to letters, as well as performing many other functions related to language, memory, numbers and so on.

The last area is at the bottom, known as the visual word form area. This area has been researched by many, including Stanilas Dehaene. This is an area that is believed to relate the form of words to their sound. What is fascinating is that this area is very active when reading in English, a language that cannot be ‘spoken as it is seen’. For those words who do not sound as they look, the shape and memory of the word is more important than the processing of the letters into sounds.

The area lights up      L’area illumine

By contrast, in languages where you do pronounce words as you see them, such as Italian, the ‘sound to letter translation’ area is more active. This experiment was conducted by a team including Uta Frith. It, along with the results of other experiments, is described in her book , ‘The learning brain’.

So what consequences does this have for language teaching? In my last post, which sprang from an ELTChat summary, I looked at what Krashen has to say about the role of reading in second language learning. What, if anything, does this information about how the brain reads tell us about our learners and their reading?  And what about the ‘reading aloud’ taboo?

Over the next few posts I plan to share some ways in which I’ve tried to adjust my approach to reading with different types of learners based on this information. If you’d like to comment or share any of your own experiences, I’d be more than happy to read and, of course, to ‘hear’them.