LINGUIST List 12.987

Mon Apr 9 2001

Review: Morgan & Cain, Foreign Lg & Culture Learning

Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terrylinguistlist.org>

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  • Steve Bird, Review of Morgan & Cain, Foreign Language and Culture Learning

    Message 1: Review of Morgan & Cain, Foreign Language and Culture Learning

     Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 10:38:31 +0100
    From: Steve Bird <sbirdvoxgeneration.com>
    Subject: Review of Morgan & Cain, Foreign Language and Culture Learning


    Carol Morgan, and Albane Cain (2000) Foreign Language and Culture Learning from a Dialogic Perspective (Modern Languages in Practice 15), Multilingual Matters, viii+160 pp., ISBN 1-85359-499-7, hardback, GBP 39.95. A paperback edition is also available, ISBN 1-85359-498-9.

    Stephen A. Bird, University of Cambridge

    'Foreign Language and Culture Learning from a Dialogic Perspective' describes a co-operative Language Learning project between school classrooms in France and England. The project was motivated by the teachers'/authors' commitment to language learning theories that assume learning is a 'dialogic process' - that is, a process in which "understanding is built up over a range of contexts through interaction with different people..."(p.1). The authors contrast this theoretical perspective with that of authors such as Chomsky and Piaget, whose theories emphasise that learning is a natural process driven by innate mechanisms, and that learning context and feedback from others (teachers, parents, and so on) are largely irrelevant to the course of development.

    The book attempts more than a description of a learning project, however. A large proportion of the content is devoted to applying sociolinguistic analysis to the materials produced by the students. This 'decoding' of the students' work appears to be serving two purposes - as some kind of evidence that the project engaged the students in dialogues, hence learning; and as a tool for revealing subtle meanings conveyed by the work.

    Language teachers will be familiar with the general practical teaching method favoured by the 'dialogic' approach: authentic language and real conversation with native speakers. Rote learning and artificial question-and-answer interactions between teachers and students are the enemy here. 'Dialogic' is the adjectival form of 'dialogue', and this book is about ways of encouraging authentic dialogue to facilitate second language learning and cultural understanding.

    The authors are on safe ground with this approach. One would be hard-pressed these days to find a language teacher who would argue against the idea of getting students to have real conversations in the target language with native speakers in order to learn. Chapter 1 goes to great lengths to demonstrate the 'dialogic' nature of learning and of language in general, but it is doubtful anyone needs convincing of this.

    The following chapters describe and analyse the project: a six-week co-operative interaction between a French second language classroom group in England and a English second language classroom group France. A topic was chosen (Law and Order) and students in each country produced written, tape recorded and videotape recorded materials in their native language. These were then exchanged and students read their counterparts products, thereby serving as replacements for textbook materials for the other group.

    The authors admit that this is not particularly innovative approach, but still, it is a nice idea. What is surprising is the difficulty the authors report encountering in setting up the exchange programme. One wonders why this not by now a well-established practice in England and France. Millions of students in both countries have been learning the others' language for centuries, and yet there apparently is no established co-operative relationship between schools in the two countries. Judging by the authors' description, it sounds as if the project was some kind of pioneering effort. This is baffling, and the main interest of this book lies in the authors' discussion of practical problems and solutions for implementing the programme on a wider scale.

    The rest of the book is dedicated to a long and detailed sociolinguistic analysis of the materials the students produced. While it is certainly interesting to consider some sociolinguistic theory in regard to student work - for example, considering some of the different ways in which learners can engage in dialogue - the level of detail and the sheer length of the commentary in the present instance seem out of proportion to the materials, which were produced by the student groups in a matter of a few days of class time. The reader is obliged to wade through page after page of unnecessary description and, frankly, uninteresting "analysis". The reader is told, for example, that "The messages transferred between the two classrooms relied on a range of signals including syntactic features (determiners, anaphora, etc.), intonation, punctuation, and the use of illustrations" (p.44). This is not informative analysis. Bearing in mind the students were writing sentences, it seems predictable enough that 'signals' such as syntax and punctuation would be used. In another instance, the authors speculate that, "the English students had a longer time-span and a wider range of resources on which to draw, and this was likely to be one of the reasons why they produced a more diverse set of materials." (p.66). Again, this is really not a valuable insight, adds unnecessary length to the book, and detracts from the important part of this project - the learning that took place through dialogue. Unfortunately these examples are only two of many in the book.

    And did any learning take place? It is hard to tell. There is a very brief, half-page section entitled 'Learning the Target Language' which says nothing about the target language learned by the students. Instead, the reader is given a few brief quotations from the students, none of which address whether the students learned or even felt they had learned any new language. Admittedly, one should not be expecting a lot of quantitative data here - this was not the aim of the project, and the students only worked on the materials for a brief time. Nevertheless, one has to object when Chapter 5 appears and some rather grand claims are made. For example, we are told that there was observed "a much higher level of cognitive engagement than is usually achieved with textbook materials." (p.98). Evidence for this comes from one student's comment that, after reading about laws in France, 'If you go on holiday, you're more aware of the law there". If claims about learning and awareness raising are going to be made, a more robust body of evidence is going to be needed. But, as has already been said, the claim that authentic dialogue leads to learning really does not need any supporting evidence, and highly questionable evidence does nothing but make the text long-winded.

    In general, this book reflects a disturbing trend in applied linguistics in which authors feel a need to produce articles and books that are 'supported theoretically', whether or not the subject matter requires or merits any sort of theoretical underpinning. The project is obviously a solid addition to a language learning curriculum and the authors are to be applauded for initiating it. Hopefully it will become a standard part of the national curriculum in the UK and France because it clearly exposes students to foreign culture, language, and real dialogue. Moreover, it encourages students to be creative and to think about both their own culture and the culture they are writing for. However, the reader does not need a lot of theoretical sociolinguistic argument to be convinced of this. This is not to say that sociolinguistic theory is uninteresting, only that that sort of theory does not serve well as a testable theory when applied to a small set of learning materials produced by a few dozen students in a couple of days. The basic feeling after all the detailed analysis is read is that the authors are finding explanations because they are looking for them, not because they are actually in the data.

    In sum, this book would have been improved considerably by being edited down to article length and presented in a practical language teaching journal as a suggestion for improving language education in Britain and France. In it's current state the value of the project is lost in all the academic theory and jargon.

    Stephen Bird holds a PhD from the Cambridge University Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. His research interests are in cognition and language learning, natural language processing, practical teaching methods, and automatic speech recognition. He currently works in the private sector developing an artificial speech recognition system.