Morning students one more time

I'm still trying to get the hang of posting video's ... I want the click-able picture!

Morning Students

My morning students:
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Recognizable input versus comprehensible input.

Blogging is bad for my health. Every time I start to work out and the endorphins start flowing I suddenly get an idea and have to jot it down right away. You know how it is with ideas. They are like retorts: Someone says something smarmy to you at a party and you're flummoxed, and then two days later you come up with a perfect snappy, witty comeback. But by then it's too late. Well, thank you blogger for interrupting my health if and only if it turns out that jotting down these ideas will turn out to be useful and lucrative for me in the future. I mean, you get your heart pumping and then you have to sit your body down to type and then you have to get your heart pumping all over again. Pumping faster I mean. So what is so momentous that I simply had to write it down? Well, I've come up with a catchy phrase. Recognizable input. I'm always wondering how people become famous for their ideas. I'm thinking about Stephen Krashen, who is the top dog on TESOL lips. So he revolutionizes the theory of language acquisition and becomes all famous for it, but will I be able to get famous by catching onto his coattails, so to speak? Well, you never know. The thing is, I agree and disagree with Krashen. Krashen said that in order to acquire a language other than your mother tongue, one of the things you must do is to bombard yourself, preferably voluntarily, with massive amounts of comprehensible input. I so agree. So the funny thing that happened to me with Italian was that I started reading Dylan Dog comics, and I couldn't get enough of them. At first I understood hardly a word, even though I had studied Italian grammar and vocabulary at the University of Cape Town for one year. But I was addicted to the comics and I'd read them again and again for the sake of the pictures, which told the story, or snippets of the story at least. I made an effort to study Italian a bit harder and then hit my Dylan Dog comics again and again. Suddenly I was conversing with my ex-Italian family in law in Italian. So yes Krashen, you are so right dude ... I truly believe that my overexposure to Dylan Dog, more so than me memorizing Italian verb-forms, led to third language acquisition.  Well of course the fact that I had to speak Italian to  make myself understood when in Italy also helped enormously.  But one thing at a time: comprehensible input. Because the comic books I read were perfectly illustrated, allowing me to follow the story and identify with the feelings of the protagonist,  the Italian I was taking in didn't seem like a foreign language to me.  I didn't understand the whole story but I understood enough of it  to let the words start accumulating in my brain without me having to memorize them.  But maybe we can broaden the idea of 'comprehensible input' to  'recognizable input'? What is recognizable input?  Words and sounds and letters  and writing that as yet carries no meaning to the language learner, but that nevertheless is recognizable. Even though you don't know what a word means, you've heard it many times before. But words don't come in isolation. I recognize Korean advertisements on TV and can sing many of the jingles without knowing what they mean. They are just sounds to me, but gradually, because I'm overdosing on them every time I turn on the TV, the balance in my head starts to tip and some stuff starts to sink in. I remember quite clearly that as a child I learned to read English by reading the entire Asterix and Obelix series thousands upon thousand of times. Hey I'm not exaggerating! It felt that way to me as a child! I've no doubt that that caused my quick acquisition of English as a second language, together of course with having an English speaking stepfather. The point is: For my first language, Afrikaans, I needed no hook because I spoke it when I started speaking. At round about age five I started acquiring English, and the hook there was my mom's collection of Asterix books. Maybe you could say it's not so much the person that acquires language, but language that acquires the person. Pardon the post-structuralism. Italian is my third language. I say so because I haven't forgotten it. I can't unhear it. I can't un-understand it. I'm rusty but it's definately inside me in all it's glorious  Latin splendor.  As I intend to stay in Korea I'm dead set on acquiring Korean as my official fourth language, and this time I know what to do. I need that hook. I've chosen Korean popsongs. I can memorize the sounds of the song and sing it even though I don't understand what it means. I know the translation but I don't equate it directly with the sounds I make. I've memorized only one song in this way so far: G-Dragon's Heartbreaker. Point is, when it plays now, I can't help but recognize every single syllable he sings. So the input is not comprensible, Mr. Krashen ... it's recognizable though. I believe that bombarding myself with recognizable input will do the trick too. Time, of course, will tell. I guess y'all can guess what song I was jumping up and down to right? Now to get back to cranking up my heart to Heartbreaker ... nado odiso kulijin anho, ajik sulmanhan kol jukji anhos, nohana temune mangajin mom ... la la la : )

The Birth Of SoundPics

So the homework I gave my mom was: "What is language?" As is often the case with philosophy teachers, I got asked 'Is there an answer'? I'm of the school that says 'Yes' to that. In case y'all don't know it: the answer (at this point in time, last I checked) is that language is a fluid structure of soundpics. A fluid structure of soundpics. That's sort of my take on post-structuralism. Post-structuralism is like advanced calculus, so before I can get there unfortunately Plato still remains to be mastered. But it helps if you have a final end in mind: like a zen koan - language is a fluid structure of soundpics. No-one has helped me more than Ferdinand de Saussure in learning how to learn language. Soundpics is what I call de Saussure's invention, and I'll get back to that later. For now I want to report on my Korean progress: The weird thing is, Santa seems to have given me Korean for Christmas. Yesterday at the several snack-based, insane, violent, Middle School English parties I was forced to attend, I suddenly started reading Korean! A Christmas miracle! It might have been a fluke, but just now reading the sub-titles to the Korean music video's on Korean MTV that I was jumping up and down to, it happened again! The timing was suddenly right. And by that I mean my intake speed of the Korean characters matched the sound coming from the fashionable pop-singers more closely. That gives you a clue what a sound-pic is: a sound-pic is (and I'm paraphrasing de Saussure here) like a coin with two sides that cannot be separated from one another. On the one side is the picture, the visual shape, the written little figure "A". Forget for a moment that "A" is A, and just see it as follows. An A is two lines leaning against each other with a short horizontal line connecting them in the middle. That's the 'pic' part of sound-pic. The sound part is the sound that comes out when the doctor tells you to stick out your tongue and say "aaah". Well, that's phonetically speaking. Of course the pic has a name that sounds like this: "Hey" without the H. Now we haven't even yet come to the fluid part of "language is a fluid structure of sound-pics". In the next exciting installment of de Saussure's structuralism we'll learn that no sound-pic is real. Par for the philosophy course : D (Hint - sound-pics are arbitrary, abstract,  volatile, and each individual sound-pic is different from every other one ... that's what makes handwriting analysis a forensic science ... )

The Big Plan

This morning I'm interrupting my morning fitness routine in order to jot down some thoughts on the 'Survival of the Fittest', which, I think, is rather fitting. By the way I know it's Christmas but I'm gonna ignore the Christmas spirit until it overwhelms me, thereby proving it's existence. I think I'm too close to Christmas to get excited about it, firstly because my name is Christine and secondly because my birthday is four days before Christmas. So in the spirit of ignoring the Christmas spirit, I'm gonna work. Yes, work! Like Scrooge! So how I'm gonna work is I'm gonna think and teach. My mother will have to suffer the consequences of my Scroogy decision, as today I'm going to continue her philosophy education by discussing Plato over Christmas lunch. But actually this is part of the Big Plan. What is the Big Plan? Survival. My mom and I are going to do our MA's in TESOL in 2010 and if I'm gonna produce a hybrid of philosophy and language teaching, I'm going to need someone to practice the Socratic method on. Getting our Master's Degree's in TESOL will bring my mom and me better jobs, hopefully at a top Korean university, so what I'm doing is actually struggling like a tree toward the sunlight, striving to survive the bestest and the longest. So the logical order of the Big Plan is to:
1. Convince my mom to hear out the entire philosophy of language course as I taught it at Stellenbosch University. This is gonna take a while. Maybe like a year. Because for once I won't have to rush it. I can start with 1 plus 1 equals two before jumping to logarithms, which is what I was having to do at university to unsuspecting students who took philosophy as a side order to something practical like Law.
2. Once I've converted my mom to the point of view that what I have learned about language so far actually already qualifies me as a Master of Language Studies, or Mistress if you will, I can write it all down in a nice neat thesis. Then someone at UNISA will read it, judge it to be adequate, and give me an MA in TESOL. Then, when I go begging again for a proper job I won't have to be embarrassed at 'only' having an MA in Philosophy.
3. Every master plan has three steps, and the third step is going to be me proving that a language can be acquired in a very short time. I don't know how short exactly, but from now till March I'm gonna study Korean like a fiend, using the theories of language I already have in place in my head. This will make the entire endeavor kinda scientific right? I mean, it's all about proof.  So I'm gonna be documenting my progress in Korean on You Tube and also trying to explain bits of my thoughts while I'm at it.
So, to summarize, the big plan is:
1.  Teach my mother philosophy and explain how it applies to language acquisition theories.  2.  Write a thesis on the philosophy of language and prove it applies to language  acquisition. 3. Prove my own theory by acquiring Korean at an alarming rate.
That's it ... survival of the fittest in a nutshell. I'm in an environment where I happen to be the mutation most perfectly adapted to present conditions, so ... I will survive! Maybe : ) Now back to fitness training, which consists of jumping up and down very fast to Korean music video's.

Spongebob video's

Today, on impulse, I decided to film my last class of the day. Fortunately I have a lot of fans in that class who also turned out to be really good camera-men! So later today I'll be uploading three ten minute video's onto YouTube and then link them to this blog. Keep watching this space!

New job

Next year I'll be working at Gojeong Elementary, a quaint picturesque country school situated close to an archeological site where dinosaur eggs were discovered. I'm happy about the job and very impressed by the work that has been done there already. In many ways the classroom is the ideal TEYL room, and I can't wait to get settled in : )