Learning a Language in the Virtual Wild: Iwona Lech

Iwona Lech

Learning a new language is difficult. Especially if you are an adult.

Of course, you probably already knew that.

According to Dr. Iwona Lech, recipient of CISLL’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award (COSSA) in 2017, students are dropping out of college-level foreign language courses at an unprecedented rate.

“It’s a real problem, especially in the last five to ten years,” said Lech.

In part, this problem sparked Lech’s interest in how to increase learning and engagement in college-level foreign language courses.

“The majority of the FL programs use a “grammar + vocabulary lists” approach, in which students learn lists of words and practice grammar rules as separate systems. They are then expected to connect the two into actual speech instances,” said Lech. “Since such skills require hours and hours of practice and additional input, language learning becomes a long and tedious journey that does not fit into a culture that celebrates immediate results. Learners achieve poor results and quickly lose interest, with only few determined enough to persevere.”

She noted that in Europe, many students teach themselves English through exposure to authentic uses of the language in virtual spaces, which she refers to as the “virtual wild”.

“English learners in Europe immerse themselves in the language in virtual worlds through reading the Web, watching original movies and television shows, and listening to music and podcasts,” elaborated Lech. “They also chat with strangers who are native English speakers through games, forums, blogs, or vlogs.”

Researchers call this phenomenon OILE (online informal learning of English), and are increasingly interested in the outcomes of this type of language learning and the ways it can be implemented in classrooms. Many explain OILE’s success through its incidental character—learners decide to engage in the activities because of their interest in a show, music, or game, and are largely unaware that learning takes place. They feel relaxed, engaged, and motivated.

This positive facet of OILE appeals to Lech. She is a proponent of positive psychology, a movement within psychology that encourages researchers to focus on the more positive side of the human condition.

“If OILE is indeed able to foster positive emotions, they, in turn, have the potential to broaden and build invaluable resources for learning a language, as per Barbara Fredrickson’s ‘broad and build’ theory of positive emotions,” explained Lech. “Removing one of the most limiting experiences in learning a new language, foreign language anxiety, could be a key solution to addressing the lack of retention in FL classes. Moreover, with today’s affordances of technology we can create immersion experiences for every language learner, despite geographical borders.”

So, if OILE is effective for Europeans learning English, could a similar approach be used for Americans learning a language other than English?

Lech attempted to find out.

For her dissertation, Lech randomly placed intermediate- to advanced-level German learners in an online German “class,” in either a traditional instruction condition or one based on OILE. In the “OILL” (online informal learning of language) condition, students were asked to find, read, listen to and watch authentic German on the Web.

She gave all participants in the experiment a pre-test, and those who completed 10 hours of engagement in the study took a post-test. She also administered an ESM (Experience Sampling Method) survey during learning sessions to find out participants’ emotions in the moment.

Unfortunately, so many people dropped out of the study it is difficult to interpret the results with any confidence.

Interestingly, the dropout did not appear to be random. Of 16 participants who completed the full 10 hours of the study, 12 had been randomly assigned to the OILL condition, whereas only four had been assigned to the experimental condition.

This pattern suggests that the OILL condition was more engaging for students than the traditional method and could potentially keep three times as many learners persevering to the end of an FL class.

Lech, who left NIU in 2018, is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Language and Culture Learning Center of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

She is not done studying how to improve foreign language learning.

“I am continuing to analyze data that did not make it into my dissertation, such as measures of emotion that I collected during the duration of the study,” volunteered Lech. “I am confident we can teach languages better and increase interest in FL courses.”

A chapter by Lech that overviews her dissertation project appeared in the 2018 book, “Teaching Language and Teaching Literature in Virtual Environments,” edited by María Luisa Carrió-Pastor.

When Should We Leave Our Beliefs Behind?: Dylan Blaum

Dylan Blaum

Psychology graduate student Dylan Blaum has arguments on his mind.

But not in the way that most people think of when they hear the word ‘argument’. For example, he doesn’t imagine people yelling at each other about whether Justin Bieber is still cool.

Instead, Blaum thinks about arguments in much the same way that Monty Python had defined them in their “argument clinic” sketch so many years ago, namely as “a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.”

Granted, the sketch was much funnier than the definition.

However, the premise of the sketch is true: many people are not skilled in evaluating arguments and they need an argument clinic to help them to do so.

Consequently, Blaum spends his days thinking and researching how people evaluate arguments and the ways that educators can help others learn this skill.

“Evaluating arguments takes effort, knowledge and reasoning. Unfortunately, many people may not use these mental tools” explained Blaum. “In order to evaluate arguments, you need to establish whether the reason or reasons are true, and if they are, whether they support the conclusion or claim. Importantly, one should put their own personal beliefs aside and let the argument speak for itself. Otherwise, people will only believe things that they think are already true. They fall into ‘belief traps’.”

As an example, Blaum cites the website Reddit which contains a number of forums in which people share their beliefs and interpretations about topics and facts.

“People get stuck in their echo chamber when they converse with other like-minded individuals. Even when presented with facts and fairly good arguments that are inconsistent with their beliefs, people will do mental gymnastics to make them fit with theirs” explained Blaum. “People typically scrutinize an argument only when it goes against their beliefs. When it is consistent with their beliefs, they tend not to, even if the argument is poor.”

Failure to correctly evaluate arguments may lead people to believe any number of false or questionable ideas, like governmental conspiracies and cover-ups. At the extreme, such beliefs can lead to deadly consequences like the nation experienced in Charlotte and Pittsburgh over the past few years.

Blaum won the COSSA (CISLL’s Outstanding Student Scholar Award) for 2018-2019 based on his research on argumentation that he has conducted with his graduate advisor Dr. Anne Britt, and for his dissertation in which he is currently working on.

In his dissertation, he plans on giving flawed and unflawed arguments to students to rate on strength and quality. An example flawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is a plant that grows naturally” whereas an unflawed argument would be “Marijuana should be legalized because it is less harmful than other already legal drugs.”

Having participants distinguish between flawed and unflawed arguments is called the flawed judgement task.

“Much prior research had people rate arguments on their strength, but the researchers in these studies appeared not to have clearly defined for their participants what ‘strength’ meant. So, for one half of my participants, I will tell them to evaluate whether the reason provides support for the claim. This will essentially give them a vital ingredient of what a good argument entails. For the other half, I will just have them rate them on strength without giving them a clear definition.”

Blaum hypotheses that by giving them a clear definition people will show an improvement on the flawed argument task because it gives them a mental schema of what an argument is.

Blaum is also testing the role of prior beliefs on argument evaluation.

“There is research which indicates that when people already believe in the general spirit of the argument, they do not see the flaws in the argument” Blaum explained. “This can lead to individuals furthering their beliefs without considering credible evidence to the contrary,” and possibly those deadly consequences mentioned earlier.

That is, for a person who already believes that marijuana should be legalized, the idea that marijuana is a naturally occurring plant is a good enough reason to believe that it should be. They think the argument is sound despite the fact that many naturally occurring plants are harmful if ingested, and the government does not knowingly legalize harmful actions.

“It will be interesting to see if their prior beliefs trump the potential positive impact of telling them what constitutes a good argument” mused Blaum. “if they do, then prior beliefs may reign supreme over reasoning.”

The findings from his dissertation may point towards ways in which citizens around the globe can be better judges of what they read and hear.

“It may not be like Monty Python’s argument clinic but people need to be more aware of why they hold certain beliefs. Getting them to understand the nature of arguments is a good beginning” added Blaum.

CISLL Celebrates Autism Acceptance Month - New Insights into How Children with Autism Learn Words: Allison Gladfelter

Allison Gladfelter

Does your pet Husky wear cool glasses?

CISLL’s Deputy Director Dr. Allison Gladfelter’s’ does.

However, her Husky is a stuffed animal which lives in her HUSKIES research lab (HUman Speech KInematics Experimental Studies) at NIU.  And the cool glasses are part of an infrared movement tracking system which directly captures how her research participants’ mouths move when they talk.

You see, Gladfelter studies word learning in children with autism. She uses the tracking system to measure the variability in lip and jaw movements when children speak. The glasses are connected to small round markers that are placed on the upper and lower lips and jaw and these detect movements which are recorded by a computer.

“I introduce the system on the Husky to show the children how they look and to put them at ease” laughed Gladfelter.

Children on the autism spectrum tend to repeat words and phrases in the exact same manner.

“This is one of the more debilitating characteristics of autism. Their repetitive speech patterns can cause them to stand out or sound unusual to others and severely curtails their social and work options” explained a more serious side of Gladfelter.

But Gladfelter has an idea.

Her idea comes from research in statistical learning. Statistical learning refers to a learner’s ability to attend to distributional information to extract meaning or structure from sensory input.

This body of research shows that variability during tasks of learning, rather than an adherence to a single pattern, is more beneficial for learning.

“Think about how to learn the perfect backhand swing in tennis. Conventional wisdom might say the best way is to practice the swing in the exact same way over and over again. However, research informs us that the best way is to vary the swing from one try to another.” Variability allows us to focus on what is common to different attempts, allowing us to distill the most important features, and this is true whether it is a tennis swing or the learning of the meaning of new words.

Gladfelter’s idea is that the variability of motor movements in the way children with autism speak may hold clues for how to improve their language learning in the future.

In her research, she has children with autism spectrum disorder and their typical peers learn and say new words. With her cool Husky glasses, she can measure precisely how their motor movements change from one attempt to the next.

“Based on my prior research, I expect to find a positive correlation between learning the meaning of new words and the amount of variability in motor movements when the child says new words over and over again” explained Gladfelter who is writing a federally-funded grant to test the hypothesis. Gladfelter encourages other researchers with expertise in repetitive behaviors in children with autism to reach out to her if they are interested in collaborating on this project.

If she does find a correlation, that doesn’t necessarily mean whether there is a causal link between motor variability and word learning, or the direction of causality if there is one. But one needs to establish a correlation before one can assess causation.

Depending on her findings, her research might point towards new ways that speech-language pathologists may help children with autism spectrum disorder. For example, the therapist might encourage more variety in the child’s speech productions during language learning tasks.

Practice makes perfect, as the old adage goes. But it might be more apt to say that variability during practice makes perfect.

And that goes for all Huskies, provided that they are not stuffed animals.