Negotiate with the elephant
Technology will still be there when the language teacher is gone
Thomas Leverett, 1-2011
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1xCdZ7l2GArTAG1cte72I12yJwJAO92XkfHt1Qd-1Es4
When I first encountered Interlanguage theory, I was attracted to it, because it gave an explanation that would allow us to stop talking about "interference". Interference is the language teacher's word for first-language structures that appear in second-language writing or speaking, but "interference," as we all know from football, basketball and meddling relatives, is not a pleasant term. It implies that if that nasty old first language wasn't there, everything would proceed much more efficiently, and everyone would be following the right rules.
Interlanguage came along to say that the second language learner was making rules and was following them; that, in the absence of well-developed or well-trusted L2 rules, he/she used L1 rules; that, sometimes the rules were self-made or patched together (neither exactly an L1 rule, or an L2 rule, but hybrid), and, that it was possible that, among rules that were overgeneralized, or inappropriately applied rules, there may also be rules that were spontaneously or inappropriately made, or even unique to the learner. I'm not sure I can attribute all of this to Selinker (1972), who originally came up with the theory, but I believed it did a better job of explaining the kind of language I actually saw on a day-to-day basis among my ESL students, some of whom made certain errors repeatedly but inexplicably.
I take for granted now that learners' language is rule-governed; that our focus, as teachers, should be their systems of language-creation, with their rules as they have adapted them and use them actively. The problem that I notice, as I turn my focus onto what rules they have been using, is that the vast majority of their writing is funneled through machines that systematically alter it in a variety of ways, and these machines have rules of their own. The average student types out an essay on Word, sometimes in front of me, and reacts, either immediately or when the essay is over, to the red lines and green lines that appear beneath the words he/she has written. Sometimes Spell-check/Grammar-check simply changes what he/she has written, on the spot; in that case, what we see is a combination of the student's rule (or lack of it) and SCGC's change. In other cases, SCGC gives the student alternates, and the student peers at them, or maybe goes farther (in the case of Spell-check, sometimes the student will look up the alternate choices); the student's ultimate choice may be a result of a number of factors, but it isn't what he/she wrote initially. A minority of students may start by typing something out in native language and simply feeding it through a translator, then taking the resulting string of words, now in English (yet hopelessly garbled), and feeding that into a grammar-checker.
What do all these student writing situations have in common? First, I believe I have now accounted for the vast majority of writing situations, given that so few writing assignments must be hand-written entirely without aid these days. The student who insists on writing papers at home is probably doing so because there is a better technological aid there, although sometimes it's because there's a wife there, or a native-speaker neighbor; in any case, the result is the same. We are no longer talking about a single partially-developed set of rules, creating an essay, but rather, a student's rules; a student's output; a computer's rules; the computer's automatic changes; the computer's advice; and the student's response to that advice. What we read at our end has come through a line of forces that have acted upon it; it's the finished product of an assembly line of rules, and we can't entirely blame the student; Spell-check and Grammar-check are loaded right onto the computer, and taken for granted as part of Word.
Before we panic and disable all the programs on student computers, we must remember that in this generation the computer has probably been involved in every step of their learning, and that it will be with them in everything they write from here on out. The argument for prohibiting all technological aid is that you now see how much a student really knows, without the complication of outside forces acting upon what he/she writes. But the argument against this is that it's so far from a real day-to-day writing situation that it's almost irrelevant how much the student really knows.
A young teacher I know put her students in a blog/chat kind of environment to develop a kind of informal rapport and active communicating situation, but she found that they made lots of typos, and even constantly failed to capitalize the i in "I". "What's this?" she asked them, pointing out all the poorly-formed pronouns, and reminding them that though the exercise was informal, this was an English class. "We don't capitalize these," they said, "because generally we don't have to…we're so used to the computer taking care of it, that we don't even see it anymore."
The story points out a number of natural tendencies. First, the teacher tends to see it in terms of student skills, or lack thereof; she didn't feel obligated, for example, to provide a computer that would capitalize those I's, or software that would simply take care of it. Second, the student was unusually forthright in explaining the problem, partly because they did have good rapport, but the problem was in fact that students had simply allowed the computer to take responsibility for one aspect of their production, and the computer wasn't always there for them. We can apply the calculator rule (because people don't have to learn how to divide anymore, they don't) to explain why students can't or don't learn the simplest things, but in fact in most writing environments it won't matter, because the computer will capitalize the I's and will also do a number of other tasks that we will come to take for granted.
When we open up the conversation to find out, really, all that has transpired from the starting point, which presumably was the student's ideas, and the finished writing product that we see, I think we will be surprised. If students were able to verbalize what they felt when they saw the red line, or the green line, and verbalize what kinds of decisions they made, and why, I think we would be surprised again. We would be surprised, first, by the complexity of the decision process and the degree that it is informed by previous experience. We would be surprised, in other words, by the changes the system has already made to the student's "system" and by the degree to which virtually all their writing is a result of this ongoing negotiation. But we'll never know this, if we don't ask.
Bibliography
Leverett, T. (2009, Nov.) Grammar-check theory. Available: http://tomsources.blogspot.com/2010/03/green-line-to-commons-grammar-check_24.html.html.
Mason, T. (n.d.). Lecture 7: Interlanguage. Critique of Krashen III. Timothy Mason's site. Available: http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/L7_Interlanguage.htm
Selinker, L. (1972), Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209-241.
Wikipedia. (n.d.) Interlanguage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlanguage.
(working paper; part of a larger unfinished work)