Getting the skill to become established

[Andrew Weiler]

I have been coaching advanced level English adult learners (in the professional fields in the main) for some time now, using the well established principles and practices of the Silent Way (as I understand and use them of course). Just to clarify advanced,  I need to add these people in the main are in employ in their chosen fields in Australia.

One distinction I have come to is that there are learners who take on what we do in the coaching sessions and do integrate the awarnesses and skill changes that have happened in the sessions with reliable regularity over time.. 

Then there are those with whom we go through identical processes, but struggle to integrate what they have arrived at in the sessions in their regular speech in their normal life. I can stop them in subsequent sessions and they immediately recognise what the issue is but that ..and the ensuing work that sometimes we do,..does not appear to make any difference to their production over time.

I have tried various strategies, from talking about it to them, doing activities that come at the issue from another vantage point, etc....yet,... 

Sometimes some things do shift I can tell but then there are others that do not

One insight I came to, from another area of life, is that getting them just to note and then count each time they become aware of the mis-take they made can shift something. The jury is still out however it made me think that I would put the main issue up here to see what others have arrived at in this area.

Looking forward to the rush of responses! :-)

all the best!
Andrew

[Laurence Howells]

Andrew

Nice to hear from you!  It's an important question - how do we make sure our work has long term effects?

It’s a phenomenon that I’ve noticed over the years for a significant minority of students that we teach sitar to in our sitar project.  In fact, I think there is usually some deeper reason - often to do with their physical condition or ‘use of themselves’ and usually entirely unconnected with music - lying behind the problem.  

And one of the problems with people who already have a lot of the language is that they may also have very ingrained habits so substituting new habits may require them to mobilise a lot of energy?

And, of course, there are some pedagogical ‘tricks’ that work for nearly everyone … but there is nothing that works for absolutely everyone.  In which case, I sometimes switch to completely opposite approaches to what I would normally do to see if that enables students to find their own breakthrough.

One thing I do do is ask students to film themselves practising at home - apart from anything else, videoing themselves practising in the knowledge that I will watch the video makes them do something different.  (I have built a website where they can post these videos (privately) and thereby build a portfolio of their progress). I never comment on any aspect of these videos other than to enthusiastically thank them for doing it. But, knowing what they are actually doing when I’m not there tells me a lot and sometimes sparks an idea to use in future lessons.

In the end it is practice that makes skills more automatised, easier, requiring less cognitive control and focused.  So maybe understanding how they practise is important information?  

In the end you can only do so much!  

Laurence

[Cedric Lefebvre]

Thank you for sharing this!

Much of what I could have written has been said already, so I'll try to be brief. 

One specific thing that came to mind for me was to try and reduce the challenge, and make them work on something tiny until they'd get it. Be obsessive about one specific kind of improvement, and work on it over several sessions, with more than enough practice, and keen observation of potential progress 'outside of the classroom'. The goal here is to create some kind of 'small victory' and be able to both celebrate and analyze it. This can reveal some ways to work against these ingrained bad habits that would work for that specific student, and help them have a sense of what they did to achieve that.

Cédric 

Stop Studying. Start Speaking.

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[Andrew Weiler]

Thank you for your considered response Laurence. As you point out it all comes down to skill development built on practice.

Reflecting more on the matter, I think the difference between the 2 cohorts of students is that one does what is needed...and gets to the promised land.

The other does the practice and somehow does not integrate the skill into their normal functioning. (I should add here that I do when I see fit provide graded practice exercises for them to work at on the particular issue they are working on. This is when I see that our work in the coaching has not influenced the way the practice at home).

With the second lot, I would suggest despite doing the practice, they persist with the problem in their everyday speaking. 

Maybe the issue is insufficient practice. However we can see many people around us who practice but don't achieve the results that others do who seem to do the same amount of practice.

Which brings us to the point that not all practice is equal. 

I suspect there are various reasons why, for some, practice does not get the results they seek. I will focus on one reason below, as I think that is where the juice.

For the ones who achieve I would suggest they are alert to the factors that have them deviate, have them alter, have them maintain the form, etc. By being vigilant, alert they recognise what has them, for eg, deviate and then can eliminate the cause.We are talking here about a quality of attention that has them being super switched on and vigilant. 

One strategy I have tried to encourage this vigilance is by getting them to be really clear why they are with me ( get a better job, etc)  External motivation. That way to get them to be more focussed on what they do.

Then I have tried to get them to see the whole thing as play, as when they play a game..for the inner satisfaction... Internal motivation...for want of a better term. 

We are talking about them shifting something inside them so they approach the practice in a different manner.  

Your strategy of videoing I think is also working on this...getting them to be more aware of what they do...by looking at themselves

The one I suggested, counting the times they notice the issue during the day, is also working on their awareness.

Their awareness is what will one way or the other shift their way of working as it dawns on them at a deeper level what they are actually doing. 

That's it for my musings on this. for now. :)

best, Andrew

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[Andrew Weiler]

Thanks for your input Cedric. 

We do achieve the small victories. That is not the issue I believe. 

The second one you raise is..how to take those victories in the coaching sessions into their life... habit formation.

Pls check out my response to Laurence where I go into this in a bit more detail.

Looking forward to your input. 

Andrew

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[Laurence Howells]

Andrew

Thinking about I wondered: how do you know that ‘they persist with the problem in their everyday speaking.’  Normally, we only know what they do in their lessons with us.

Which brings us back to the fundamental point: you can’t be responsible for what they do in everyday life.  

To me this re-emphasises my role as teacher: they try, I give feedback.  That’s it. 

How many times over the years have I been given feedback in my Japanese lessons that the ‘counter word’ 目 (me) as in 一月 (hitotsume, ‘first’) — is one mora (beat)?  Happened again last lesson!  So, at the end of the day it’s up to me to do something about it!  And now I guess I’ve got sufficiently irritated with myself to do that something!  So here’s my video practice!  I'm practising it in the context of the kinds of phrases that I was trying to say in my lesson ... I'm saying things like 'The first time recording', 'The second recording' etc.  I'd worked on these in the lesson and slept on it ...

Laurence

https://youtu.be/3S9lgE385Rk

[Andrew Weiler]

Hi Laurence,

You are absolutely right, I have no idea what happens in their life. However, I surmise that if they are not correcting themselves in an environment where they know I'll be expecting the improvement, then it is doubtful if they are doing it in real life where their attention will be consumed by other things.

I cannot be responsible for what they do in their life however I have taken on some additional responsibility in my coaching to see if there is anything I can do for them to get that they do have to take on the responsibility for actioning it in their lives by getting "active" in front of their own practice at home...much the same way as you did in your video. 

It boils down to "getting" that active practice driven by their own drive and self awareness is critical...Just mindlessly repeating sentences etc is not really going to get you far... as we both know. There is something that needs to happen for a person who is doing the latter to move to the former. My interest is in that as well, not just ensuring that they, in our sessions together,  can correct what they are doing..and perform it in the limited ways possible in the time we have.

In Silent Way classes this issue is not really evident, as classroom work is what we are concerned about.  Nevertheless the issue that underlies the question facing me here I believe is at the heart of what we work at in classes. The notion of "silence", I believe in part, is about getting students "active"...to take responsibility. In classes, we work at that... 

The question arises for me is what we can do in a coaching environment to achieve a similar outcome. 

Anyways..will keep working at it :-)

ATB. Cheers,

Andrew

	Andrew Weiler P +61 409 331 607    E  anwe...@gmail.com

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[Laurence Howells]

Aaah yes!  I see that.  It probably is part of our job to help them do the sort of practice that makes a difference.  

‘How do we provoke the awarenesses in our students that focused practice will make a difference?’

I’ll be thinking about this question over the next few lessons I give!

Laurence

PS incidentally there was a spelling mistake in my post it should have been 一つ目(hitotsume) … it’s been annoying me ever since I pressed the ‘post’ button.

[Roslyn Young]

One of my students is Australian, learning French. Let's call him Fred. Fred has always pronounced the word "Australie" using the English /ei/ sound in the second syllable instead of the French /a/. I correct it using my fingers to show the syllables and Fred says it correctly. I ask him to say it again three times, wanting him to practise saying it correctly, but by the third time, the second syllable has reverted to /ei/. 

I don't give Fred homework because I think it will simply reinforce this deeply entrenched bad habit. Almost all multisyllabic words in Fred's French are affected by this problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what I should do with Fred?

[Piers Messum]

Part of the answer (in general, and possibly with Fred) might be in the energy in the student that is associated with the awarenesses that we provoke. 

John Mason is a mathematics educator (now retired) who's been an important part of ATM in the UK, and in its Science of Education group that works on Gattegno-related themes. He wrote a book called The Discipline of Noticing, and one point he makes in this is that 'noticing' can be broken down into three reasonably distinct categories. I've pasted his own words about this into a Google Doc that you should be able to see here.

I'm learning Japanese online with Laurence at the moment, in a Silent Way class taught by SW Tokyo (Yoko and Sumiyo). I can find the distinctions that Mason draws within me in that, and the awarenesses that I mark or which generate enough energy for me to want to record them are, I think, the ones which are most contributing to whatever progress I'm making. I have a sentence within me from yesterday (Laurence: 'nanika hitotsu owattara, tsugi no koto o suru mae ni jikan ga hoshikunai desu ka?' - that one) which is definitely changing my relationship to the language.

I wonder if this is related to Gattegno describing the 'forcing' of awarenesses by the teacher. I've always understood this to mean that the teacher arranges things so that a student cannot fail to notice something about the situation and the language that expresses it, but perhaps there's also something about the energy with which the student comes to this realisation that is important, and is expressed in the word 'forcing' in some way. There are stories about Gattegno having observers to his classes being outraged by the challenging way in which they thought he was dealing with learners, but then the learners themselves reporting that they found nothing objectionable about the way he was pushing them at all. In fact, appreciating it.

I agree that the main issue is utilisation of what comes up in a lesson after it. The type of noticing that goes on within it might be a factor in motivating this. I was struck by what Cedric said about being obsessive about at least some types of improvement a student should make. He and I share a student (learning French with Cedric, English with me) and this person was very complimentary yesterday about how Cedric pushes him in their lessons, and what this gives him. (I don't push him enough, I'm sure.)

With best wishes

Piers

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[Laurence Howells]

Ah! Yes … that ‘hitotsu’ is cool isn’t it!  Personally, I prefer the response: 何か一つが終わったら、次のことを考えるからその時間が無駄にしません。

My way of putting (which I got from Don) is I have to irritate students enough that they take whatever it is on board.  Not always easy but I got exactly that look from a student this morning ‘Why is he so annoying!’ When I refused to accept ‘in living room’ for the 10th time … at that moment I thought ’maybe I’ve got through to him’ - well we’ll see…

Laurence

[Andrew Weiler]

Roslyn, 

It is interesting that I had a Chinese student learning English that had virtually the same issue in reverse 

/æ/ to /ei/ 

Not an uncommon issue with Chinese speakers. 

As with your student, mine was eventually, with some “trickery”, able pronounce it correctly but then would lose it in the middle of some basic practice. 

I would ask her, “did you hear a change?” 

“Huh, what change?” 

I ended up sorting out that the reverting  would only happen between consonants and only after some. 

This went on for some weeks. The homework I gave was in areas I knew she had full control. And very limited homework on the problem area… to see if she could identify if she changed. Didn’t help. 

Then we worked to identify what is happening in the mouth… the tongue especially… for her to feel what she did with it when saying /æ/ by itself. 

That definitely shifted something as then she had something to focus on in saying the sound. I had to guide her awareness a bit but she ended up feeling what was done to make that sound. 

From then, we slowly moved to the regular kind of work on it. 

Don’t know if that will help…. 

Cheers

Andrew

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[Andrew Weiler]

Interesting Piers. Thanks for the reference. Will certainly follow it up. 

Your observation about the role of “forcing” made me think about the issue I raised at the start. Getting students to take responsibility is not that straightforward, even in classes. 

Students can get frustrated and annoyed by a teacher not giving them the answer, by getting them to try again and again. This is a way of getting them to be “ active” in front of the issue before them. To get them energised in a way they may not regularly be in front of their learning. That shift we are looking is I believe one of the core distinctions of the SW…. 

This is shift is precisely what I want to get my student to experience. In a coaching environment the dynamics are different for a host of reasons. 

	Cheers M

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[don cherry]

These posts have really resonated with me. Both as a teacher of English and student of Japanese, I’ve felt the same frustrations observing errors that seem to keep returning even after what felt like successful work on fixing them. After reading these posts, my mind got to wandering and wound up in a place that may or may not be related to the posts but is a place I recently sometimes find myself, and at the risk of possibly changing the subject (but maybe not), I’ll just mention here that one of my concerns lately is the feedback I’m giving students and the feedback they’re receiving may not be the same thing. One thing that I often work on with my students is the separable phrasal verbs “take out of” and “take off (of)”. Even after working again and again on these areas, admittedly especially challenging for my Japanese students, they still seem to find it terribly difficult to separate the phrase. And I’m thinking maybe all the clever work I’m doing with my finger correction may be seen by my students as, “Uh oh, he’s got his fingers out. Better put something between ‘take’ and ‘out’” this may not be the best example, but it can be stated more plainly as “just because I gave feedback to the student and the student corrected their language does not necessarily mean that we understood each other, that the awareness I hoped to force was forced, that learning actually took place.” This may simply be a problem that occurs from time to time and is an inevitable part of the process. Can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that. Still, thinking about it keeps me humble. 

[Andrew Weiler]

A very familiar experience Don. Not quite the same for me of course but have definitely noticed a similar dynamic. Leaving the "area" and returning to it  later sometimes shifted something for the ones who were not getting it. Attacking the issue from another vantage point was another strategy I used. But then sometimes with some students, I just had to leave it...always wondering is there something else I could have done to get them to open up to a new awareness. 
I figure that there are some who may not be ready to let go of a belief  so a new awareness can appear... we are all the same in that. :-)
Reminds me of that Zen story about having to empty the cup before it can be refilled. Doesn't quite hit the nail on the head with what we are talking about here but there is some overlap. The forcing at times is about that...the discomfort that students can feel is to do with that..letting go of beliefs/views of the world can be uncomfortable.I do what I can do... left with the question, what didn't I do...when the mark is not hit.