Comments on: I is for Imitation

By: shahram

shahram — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 07:43:23 +0000

Dear Scott,
I have really enjoyed the articles in “An A to Z of ELT”. Reading them has greatly helped me reflect on what I learned from the past and revise my ideas. Thanks anyway.
I especially like the idea:”populate the words of others with one’s own intentions’. The key is in “one’s own intentions” where the child may extend the input he has received to novel situations, hence, an indication of creativity. It may also try to achieve a different goal than the one for which the input had been used.
I have a question: It is clear that both native and non native speakers are creative language users. However, non native speakers’ creativity would depend on the amount of exposure to the language, the more exposure, the more creative. I wonder if we can discuss creativity of both native and non native speakers in terms of amount given the fact that the language used by native speakers is more idiomatic and metaphorical ,and non native speakers tend to avoid idiomatic language. A trace of non native speaker-ism can always be traced in their speech.

By: Svetlana

Svetlana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:15:50 +0000

Yet you have but agree that some of the language in first language aquisition is imitated and later gets acquired without clear thought (meaning) behind it (PPP sequence) For example, names of colours. The opposite process is when there is a thought first but no word for it (TBL cycle).

By: Scott Thornbury

Scott Thornbury — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:00:29 +0000

“Can i ask you another question? What method implies imitation without understanding?”

Answer: The method that is advertised in the pictures I uploaded in my original post: You listen. You repeat. You understand.

I used to ridicule this. Now I’m wondering if the imitation of only dimly understood utterances may in fact feed into language use and thence language acquisition.

By: Svetlana

Svetlana — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:53:02 +0000

Dear Scott,
thank you very much for your reply.
Can i ask you another question? What method implies imitation without understading?
And understanding — what does it mean?
In my view imitation is successful and makes sense only if the learner undertands three dimentions of what he repeats — where and when I say it (pragmatics), what I say (meaning) and how i say it (form). But the most essential thing is understanding why i am repeating it (motivation). Forced Imitation against the learner’s will is the one that can’t be tolerated by any learner. Moreover, it may even inhibit further learning. Vygotsky claims that formal education based on such forced imitation doesn’t lead to any development, quoting Leo Tolstoy in the same book, chapter 6.
I have but agree — forced imitation is harmful, therefore can’t be tolerated as you say.
But what method does it? The only one i can think of is declenions< conjugations, etc in the Grammar Translation. What else?

By: Scott Thornbury

Scott Thornbury — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 07:56:58 +0000

Thanks, Svetlans – yes, perfect sense – except that I am still uncertain as to how much imitation without truly understanding can be tolerated – at least be some learners. After all, the case for providing comprehensible input, as argued by Krashen, assumes understanding is both necessary and sufficient, i.e. that there is no learning without understanding. A listen-and-imitate model seems to reverse this sequence, assuming that understanding will emerge out of opportunities for retrieving, reassembling and experimenting with the imitated elements.

As for guided discovery, I tend to agree with you – there’s a disussion about it on this blog, in fact. You’ll find it here.

Thanks once again.

By: Svetlana

Svetlana — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:53:35 +0000

Dear Scott,

I was delighted to see the cover of the book by Vygotsky in this post, because I have been rereading it myself quite recently, digging out more and more thought-provoking data and ideas in it.

As for the imitation idea and the sequence Listen! Imitate! Understand! Figure it out! it does exist in modern methodology under the name of guided discovery. While the Audio-lingual method left the process of figuring out the rule incomplete, unfinished, limiting it to mere repetition of sample sentences to create automaticity, guided discovery is aimed to finish the process of figuring out the rule by helping the student to form awareness, mental presentation, i.e. explicit knowledge of various kinds of the rule. The key feature of this student-created knowledge is its full, 100% adaptation to the student’s internal system of knowledge. It can be quite an amazing discovery for the teacher after having students figure out the rule, to ask them for their verbalized explanation of the rule, the way they have understood it. My experience — no grammar reference book writer has ever managed to provide explanations with such creativity and simplicity. This can be applied to practically any age, even young learners (six and above) are able to interpret rules verbally after going through the process of guided discovery and noticing the pattern.. Yet having become explicit the “the figured-out” rule does not guarantee that it will remain available for monitoring one’s speech until it becomes automated. Young children up to the age of 12 are not able to monitor their speech behaviour (which is just one form of their behaviour) due to the lack of developed consciousness, abstract thinking abilities, i.e. cognitive maturity. That’s why they are those learners who are in need of more mere repetition practice, meaningful drilling (term from the book How languages are learned by Nina Spada and al) ideally combining focus on form and meaning. Yet this process of figuring out the rule with the help of the teacher is what is called teaching in my opinion. Moreover, Vygotsky’s notion of imitation can be extended to mean a form of scaffolding, i.e. imitating not only a word or a chunk or a sentence by repeating it, but imitating the process of figuring out the rule for the further independent self-discovery.

As for the Silent Way it IS based on imitation of very limited input, just one utterance for a start, but the process of imitation is integrated into “figuring out” stage, there is a lot of teacher guidance through her body language, either approving or disapproving the student’s attempt in producing the utterance accurately, i.e. imitating it. The method does work, because through this labour of reconstructuring the teacher’s model, a solid piece of explicit knowledge is created which becomes available for longer time as a tool to monitor one’s output.

This sequence Listen! Imitate! Understand! Figure it! is what teaching is about because it makes a bridge between acquisition and learning. And it calls for more teacher presence in the lesson, the teacher being not just someone who provides comprehensible input. In the long run, the result of this work is creating a SYSTEM of knowledge in the student’s head, developing him cognitively to much higher levels of abstract thinking.

Does it all make sense, sorry?

By: Scott Thornbury

Scott Thornbury — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:41:12 +0000

I think, Russell that, with regard to Chomsky, the operative tense is ‘got some re-evaluation’, not ‘is getting’.There have been many scholars who, for a long time now, have remained profundly sceptical, not to say completely dismissive, of the notion that we are ‘hard-wired’ for language, and that there is such a thing as Universal Grammar – i.e. the motor that generates those rules that account of our linguistic creativity. Rather, as Tomasello (2003) argues, “The human capacity for language is best seen as a conspiracy of many different cognitive, social-cognitive, information-processing, and learning skills, some of which human beings share with other primates and some of which are unique products of human evolution” (p. 321). One of these skills is the capacity to imitate, and to do so intentionally and adaptively.

By: russell

russell — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 01:26:02 +0000

I think it’s interesting Chomsky is getting something of a reevalution. His strangle hold over linguistics is quite curious considering he,　to my knowledge, has never actually tested any of his theories, they are all just hypothetical. Nattinger and DeCarrico (sp?) I think note that chunks are learnt whole and then broken down. You might want to look at Hoey’s ideas about lexical priming…it is not so much complete imitation but linking together words that are often linked together.

This is certainly my experience of learning a foreign language…I can speak Japanese pretty well and I believe it is largely chunks of imitated language I paste together…this is only anecdotal though.

By: Sulabha Sidhaye

Sulabha Sidhaye — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:21:17 +0000

A truly interesting discussion, highlighting the different processes that go on along with imitation, in language learning. As a teacher of English in multi-lingual India, I find it useful to differentiate between incidental and conscious learning, also between learning at different age-groups and according to the no. of languages known to the learner.

In India, school children learn 3 to 4 languages. The methods change as they move from mother-tongue to national language Hindi, then to English and finally either a classical language like Sanskrit or a foreign language like German or French. Imitation at L1 is unconsciously done at home for oral usage but consciously used for writing in school.
For the national language Hindi, there is selective imitation based on the responses to the repeated usages like when one student has to say something which the other then acts out. This gets reinforced even in social life, where a student buys something using Hindi with the shop-keeper.

While learning English, students begin practice by copying the model [either the teacher or a recording], followed by application, where the grammatical structure or intonation is used with substitute phrases or situations. Like the word order of a question, or the falling tone of a statement,each one using another word from pictures provided for practice. So each student asks a different question ,applying the same word order and another one replies with an appropriate answer in the prescribed tone. No doubt, some amount of L1 interference creates errors at first, but soon students grasp the rule correctly by noting the contrast with L1. Probably this learning is even stronger than by a monolingual student ..

As Sanskrit and European languages are taught at an older age, selective imitation is very conscious, inferring the rules, contrasting them with known languages and applying them according to need.

English is used as a medium for higher or professional education in India. Therefore ,in adult life, media seems to play an important role where learners borrow effective wording or individual tones used by popular commentators from all over the world, which are found effective in given situations.Particularly, arguments on current topics by experts, help students select particular usages according to the purpose served , therby relating a usage to a function.Even the Ted lectures are used as models for imitation by listeners.

I have a lot of examples in mind, but feel that citing them here would make this writing too long! For sure, it is the performance that fixes the competence.

By: Catherine Kennedy

Catherine Kennedy — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:24:34 +0000

A brilliant post, and a fascinating array of comments!

Perhaps, and this is definitely NOT to detract from the detailed and totally relevant comments people have made, the real issue is the message implicit in the liguaphone ad and others like it. They imply that their system will excuse the student from taking responsibility for their own learning. And nothing in the world, no language method certainly, ever lets us off thinking for ourselves. I don’t care how expensive it is.