Languages: on the radical reform of university education.

nobody seems to be motivated
economically or politically to cross-examine the mediocrity of our higher education system let alone to carry out experiments or innovations that could fundamentally improve it in terms of what's possible within my lifetime we need more dissent we need more demands for fundamental radical change [Music] i'm very skeptical about this kind of question because i'm aware of what an atypical language learner i am myself i'm really deeply aware that what works for me doesn't work for 98 of other people trying to learn a language so i'm actually open to the radical disruptive possibility that what goes on in the classroom should be 100 spoken language or that the most effective method could actually be zero percent spoken language because to some extent this is a judgment on human nature itself as a judgment on what kind of person learns a language with what kind of motivations what they do outside of the classroom what they learn despite formal education there are a lot of variables here i can't pretend to know without doing the research the question is who is going to do the research [Music] when you're talking about science and when you're talking about the impacts science will have on society it's very important to separate things that are unknowable from things that merely happen to be unknown there's always going to be a political or economic explanation for why things remain unknown that are in fact knowable scientific research can cost millions of dollars and if you were the one paying or investing those millions of dollars what are the odds that this research will actually earn back your investment in some cases there's absolutely no chance of you earning any money whatsoever out of scientific research we knew a woman who had a three-legged dog she believed in the vegan diet not only for humans but also for dogs she fed this dog a strictly vegan diet it had a whole series of unbelievable health problems she got advice from all the best websites you know she downloaded seemingly well researched scientific claims of what you should feed your dog if you wanted to have a vegan diet and in her case it just didn't work i remember i talked to her about this face to face i was like look we we barely we barely know that veganism works for human beings there hasn't been a whole hell of a lot of research done if you take a multivitamin pill every day and you're vegan you're going to be fine that's been established you know but it's not some big research party who who would pay millions of dollars to investigate the adequacy of a vegan diet for dog nobody's gonna do that research nobody can make the money back and nobody in parliament is gonna pay for it it's not like a democratic government is gonna sit down and say look guys this is a research priority we need to allocate money we need to make it a priority to figure out what is the healthiest diet for vegan dogs you know um you're not going to get some kind of incentive coming from the military right military applications major source of scientific and technological innovation in our society we wouldn't have saran wrap without the us military trying to research the best way to make a submachine gun bullet proof when carrying it through the swamps of cambodia and vietnam that's the origin of saran wrap having this kind of plastic wrap they'd wrap up the guns march through the swamp and then you could you could whip it out and go into action if you had to if you got ambushed it was real quick to tear it off and go on a true story all right so look when you talk about scientific progress talking about what's knowable but still unknown you've got to think of this in both economic and political terms what do you think is more effective having university students take four different courses in four years or take the same course again and again and again and again does that sound preposterous to you you know i have a background in the theater i understand how theatrical education works for you know memorizing and performing a script like let's say it's shakespeare for memorizing and performing dance movements physical movements certain types of music i don't think all memorizing and performing something precisely until it's 100 accurate a lot of military education also has to do with drill with performing the same set of motions the same set of actions again and again and again until it's perfect all right in a totally unquestioned manner what our universities tell people is 51 is a pass it's a d minus right 75 is fine it's like a b plus right we had a standard at our university you needed to get 70 to go from level 1 to level 2 in japanese or chinese though so seventy percent seventy percent is good enough then of course you look at the actual exams you'll get the actual in class exercise and to get seventy percent is incredibly sloppy like the way you're evaluated you're not remotely mastering the language material to get seventy percent it's way more like thirty percent mastery to get a creative of seventy percent because like what's considered a right answer and a wrong answer on the exams there's a lot of leeway right it's not it's not pushing you to get 100 accuracy right let's say let's say we take 200 university students and put them through a normal university course in chinese you know normal kind of structures like look guys you need to really get 70 to pass this course and go on the next course okay 100 of the students half of the class you then have go on to the level 2 course new vocabulary new textbook the sequel to the level one type so they did one year of the level one course they go on to the level two course normally and then you take the other half of the students and you say to them look that wasn't remotely good enough you guys didn't really master you didn't really learn the vocabulary and the grammar in the level 1 textbook so you're going to do it again and this time you have to aim to get 99 we are going to push you to achieve perfection and the passing grade for this course is now 95 if you get under 95 you fail we're going to give you the same lectures you know like it's not going to be identical but you're going to come you're going to have one full year same amount of time you're going to hear the same lectures you're going to read the same stories in the textbook you're going to have basically the same tests for the same vocabulary and the same grammar but this time you're going to master it you're going to have it down cold you're not going to stutter you are going to come in and when you have to perform for the class when you have to perform these dialogues you are going to perform this is going to be at the same level of excellence as performing art school where you're singing and dancing so you can be good enough for broadway so that you can audition with this your enunciation your elocution your memorization how well you speak the language how well you write the language your handwriting you're going to take pride in you are going to give it 110 and you're going to try to get above 95 percent in this otherwise completely crappy mediocre normal university course this is a two-year experiment with 200 people which which class do you think is going to have better results right i would bet money the class that takes the same course twice one year after another you know ketterous parabus all things being equal the class that does the fundamental level one course twice will have a huge advantage in that language for the rest of their lives because it's the material taught in the level one course that is the most important for you to master it is the most difficult for you to master especially in your first year of being exposed to a totally new language totally new way of thinking total new sound system like it's hard to listen to it's hard to follow right and also because these are human beings who are alive 24 hours a day seven days a week and even if they are somewhat bored to have exactly the same vocabulary and the same stories and the same exercises in the classroom right outside of the classroom they're going to be listening to this language or practicing they're going to be doing things to amuse themselves with the language to make it interesting for themselves that's going to remain their duty outside of class right this is the world's simplest experiment questioning the value of repetition in language learning is there really any doubt in your mind that repetition is a tremendously important part of language learning and yet it is not in any way part of our university system of education like our university system education is based on the idea that novelty is the most important part of language acquisition and again compare that to military concepts of education compare that to performing arts school and the extent to which language itself is a performance like you're expected in a split second to summon up the vocabulary and perform in the course of having a dialogue um now just say to argue against my position for a moment i think some people might say to me that what i've just proposed makes sense for chinese maybe it might make sense for sanskrit latin but that it wouldn't make sense for modern french they'd say oh but you know but there's no point once you've done the level one course then you can just go on to level two and first there's no point it's not it's not as involuted and complex and difficult as getting to write the chinese characters correctly or getting to here i completely disagree all right i live in canada where i am completely surrounded by people who did all of high school and all of university studying french and they still suck at the fundamentals of the french language that are taught in that year one level one course they never got them down they never achieved perfection they never achieved accuracy and reliability in nailing those fundamentals partly phonetic and phonological partly grammatical partly kind of philosophical like the real rudiments of the language i once had a conversation with a guy he was born and raised in sri lanka he was sinalise and i was a white guy learning the ancient language pali that language palpati is powerfully linked to modern sri lanka not worth explaining the whole socio-linguistic situation we had this long conversation uh talking about the history of the language and how to study it and its connections to buddhist philosophy and connections to the history and politics of sri lanka and he was very impressed with me i he probably had never met another white guy who had that level of knowledge the language thing and so we had this this conversation and then he said to me he was very dramatic in his matter of speaking as many many cineledees are he said you know well show me show me the textbook you're using like how did you how did you learn this i was choking the language and i said i have it in my pocket of course which is true back then when i was studying a language i would i would carry it on me you know what i mean and uh it was a textbook i'd kind of made myself not worth talking about and so i i whip i whipped this thing out you know it's put together from photocopies when i say i made it myself you know i pieced it together myself and he looks and he says but this but this is incredibly rudimentary that like you you must be much too advanced and i said to him on the contrary i'm on page 12 but i know the first 11 pages exceedingly well i meant it as a punchline but it was also literally true when i studied the pali language i memorized every single word in the textbook i worked on it thoroughly all right and all these people like perceive me as a genius that guy's not the best example there were people with phds and professors i met all these professors who didn't know any of the stuff i knew right and the reality was they never got the foundations they never got their foundations in the language and then they never got the foundations in terms of philology and they couldn't just pick up a page in this language and read it and cope they couldn't deal with the orthography the whole whole story of the stuff i've been around so i've been around a lot of those guys with phds and why look i can sympathize the guys i knew who had phds even even when their phd was pali they did a phd just in this language nothing else right they had like a one-year university course doing the fundamentals that they had to rush through while they were taking four other courses depending on your system maybe six other courses whatever university system is right and they probably had a girlfriend they might have had a part-time job right and it's this yeah yeah mentality oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i gotta hustle i gotta get 75 on the exam i gotta get eighty percent exam and eighty percent doesn't mean eighty percent in our university system not with the knowledge of languages i don't know any field of study where eighty percent really means eighty percent eighty percent means good enough right it definitely doesn't mean that without any handwritten notes to help you without being able to use the dictionary on your mobile phone or computer that you you know that vocabulary that you have it down cold you can summon it up from memory in a split second when it's needed that you've really done the drill to be able to use the language and even when reading even when doing rapid reading comprehension reading comprehension without the aid of a dictionary without the aid of a computer or a cell phone right it doesn't mean you can do any of that getting eighty percent in large course and these guys the guys who had phds i know they then had to roll on then next year it's a new course and a new with the language like pal you're lucky to get two years of uh university language education and then you know everyone's ushering along oh yes well you know the important thing is to take this advanced course on linguistic theory or philosophy or the history of asia or something let's let's get you writing essays about linguistic concepts or sociolinguistics nobody really cares about whether or not you have the fundamental competence in this language i've seen so many things written by people with phds who knew less pali than i did they lacked my confidence in lotion in thai in cambodian i have a book review still up with that it's like sir i know i know this much cambodian but i knew more than people with phds in that field right i know how the system works i know it doesn't work and i have sympathy for the people who are the greatest victors in that system the people who are most privileged by most advantaged by that system because from my perspective they are ultimately its most pathetic victims they end up with a credential that says they're fluent in this language says that they're competent and they spend their whole lives struggling lacking utterly the necessary confidence i have seen experiments of this kind done in sports education i have seen experiments of this type done in bodybuilding in sports like baseball and in sports like basketball where people really seriously ask the question what is the most effective way to teach someone to throw a ball faster in baseball what is the most effective way to increase people's accuracy in shooting a basketball and they really rigorously compare different methodologies of teaching and bodybuilding it's all on another level is it more effective to lift twice as much weight in three weeks or to more gradually increase your weight all of that gets tested rigorously all right and of course there are economic explanations for that more than there are political in this case i have never seen and never heard of any study that simply compared the efficacy of having more and less emphasis on the spoken elements of language i've seen so many people with phds shout out to victor mayer who's a complete imbecile great example of an episode with a phd by the way i've seen so many people making grandiose claims that their own method of language learning alone is superior because of its emphasis on spoken language or its emphasis on written language this kind of thing i have never seen anyone say divide a body of 400 students into four groups let's just ask ourselves hypothetically what will be more effective if we spend absolutely zero time in class speaking where the spoken component of the language is zero this is a scenario i have lived through at the university of victoria absolutely zero spoken language and why because it's expensive to actually pay a professor or tutor to sit there and speak with you and correct your speaking whereas it's cheap to just give a lecture to 40 students or 400 students who sit in silence and take notes there's an economic reason why silent note taking and people doing multiple choice exams while listening to an audio cd playing these sorts of things take priority in the university setting over actual spoken practice conversational drill or theatrics getting on stage and performing a scene with a professor or someone correcting you how effective do you think it could possibly be to teach students chinese without speaking in the total absence of speaking how well can anyone learn a language like chinese sadly this is not a hypothetical question many university programs because they're trying economically to be as efficient as possible they don't want to pay a professor or tutor to sit with you one-on-one and practice dialogues back and forth they just want to pay a professor to stand at the front of the room behind a podium give a lecture to 40 students or even more profitable give a lecture to 400 students have them all take notes in silence have them watch a movie in silence have them listen to an audio cd and then fill out a q a test right do multiple choice exams while listening uh to an audio cd that's profitable for university paying for one-on-one language training where you really practice speaking where the professor hears you and catches the mistake you're makes you're making and corrects you and says okay now say it again that's expensive why has nobody ever endeavored to do a study where you practice the efficacy of teaching a language with no speaking component at all as opposed to 25 percent of the curriculum being speaking practice as opposed to 50 being speaking practice as opposed to 75 percent being speaking practice as opposed to 100 of the educational experience being just the spoken language there are specialists there are experts who claim the most effective way to achieve language fluency is 100 focus on the spoken language in terms of formal education and what it provides to you it seems intuitively obvious that neither zero percent nor a hundred percent could be the best course of action but the honest truth is we don't know scientifically this is something that's not unknowable it's something that's just unknown i'm very skeptical about this kind of question because i'm aware of what an atypical language learner i am myself i'm really deeply aware that what works for me doesn't work for 98 of other people trying to learn a language so i'm actually open to the radical disruptive possibility that what goes on in the classroom should be 100 spoken language or that the most effective method could actually be zero percent spoken language because to some extent this is a judgment on human nature itself as a judgment on what kind of person learns a language with what kind of motivations what they do outside of the classroom what they learn despite formal education there are a lot of variables here i can't pretend to know without doing the research the question is who is going to do the research in discussing this kind of problem pathetically the conclusion we come to is there are very few sources of innovation in education who's going to try new different exciting interesting things possibly multi-millionaires possibly the innovation comes from the government possibly it comes from the military or the diplomatic corps once in a long while an eccentric millionaire or a group of eccentric millionaires put their money together to try something new and different in terms of what's possible within my lifetime we need more dissent we need more demands for fundamental radical change in education it's very obvious now what the economic demand is and what the political demand is for electric cars and for improvements in solar power so we all know that research is going to get done and that change is going to happen but there's absolutely nothing inevitable about change or improvement in education let alone language education in specific as soon as people have university credentials it is in their interest to exaggerate the value of those credentials nobody seems to be motivated economically or politically to cross-examine the mediocrity of our higher education system let alone to carry out experiments or innovations that could fundamentally improve it [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes