In this post and the posts that follow, I will mention some of the concepts that have been most important to me during my MA TESOL journey. Concept #1 is decoding.
The illustration above (“Do you see this little bird?”) is a detail from an 1885 Japanese edition of Barnes New National First Reader. The English sentence is displayed with the pronunciation rendered in katakana (top row), a word-by-word Japanese translation (third row), and numbers (6-1-5-2-3-4, bottom row). The idea is that if you read the translations in numerical order, you will get a complete (though awkward) Japanese translation of the sentence. In other words, the reader is guided to follow the numbers and translations to decode the English text into Japanese. Language textbooks often inadvertently encourage decoding, but this is an exceptional, and extreme case of the overt teaching of decoding.
As an English teacher (and as someone who speaks another language), I think a lot about decoding. Decoding feels like the opposite of what a language teacher would want a learner to achieve: the ability to think in the target language without reference to one’s L1. But is this in fact possible in an absolute sense? Can one completely remove L1 consciousness from one’s interpretation of L2 texts? Should one want to do this? I am quite fluent in Mandarin, and I do not feel that I “think” in English when I speak Chinese, but aren’t all of my utterances in some way influenced by my experiences in all of my languages and dialects? Don’t I in fact decode all texts I read or hear through my experiences?
In fact, decoding can be quite helpful in language learning. As a beginning student of Mandarin, I appreciated English grammatical explanations, and lexical glosses. As I became more advanced, I took an immersive course at Middlebury. By that point, my Mandarin was sufficiently competent that I could, by and large, decode new Mandarin texts into simpler Mandarin, without reference to English. But I was still decoding, and the basis of that decoding (at some remove) was my L1.
I am playing fast and loose here with the concept of decoding, which I haven’t yet defined — because I’m not sure I can. In its extreme case it means translating everything from L2 to L1 in order to process it. It seems to take one as far away as one can possibly be from automaticity, understanding without needing to consciously analyze the text, the cornerstone of fluency. I think, however, that we often need to decode, even in our first language, when communication breaks down. For example, if I have to read an English legal document, and I am not familiar with the terminology in that document, I might, with the help of a lawyer, or a legal dictionary, need to decode it into a language I can understand more intuitively. Or, if I’m having a conversation with a friend, and we have a miscommunication, I mean need to ask for clarification, a simple form of decoding.
When I came across the Japanese edition of Barnes New National First Reader in 2012, I downloaded it and saved it for future reference. It seemed like an illustration of what was wrong with many textbooks for Japanese learners, and an example of something I wanted to avoid as a teacher. While I still feel that such a complicated translation algorithm is not an effective way to learn English, I am less judgmental of the original text than I used to be. First of all, the text, produced in the Meiji period, was a product of its time. For centuries, Japanese students have learned to read Classical Chinese texts by a similar method, and it was natural to apply the same teaching techniques to Western languages when the need to learn them first arose. The method served well for Classical Chinese (it is still used in Japan today, in fact), since that is a dead language, and there was no particular need to process it in real time.
These days, I feel that I was overly critical of decoding. I think the important questions a teacher should consider are: what level of decoding is appropriate, and what is excessive? Are there exercises that can be done that encourage encoding? That discourage it? I believe, for example, that when students are introduced to new target language, decoding is necessary (though not necessarily into L1), and should be encouraged. Once the target language has been grasped, it may be helpful to practice it in a way that discourages decoding (e.g. through an activity that requires production of lots of target language in a short time period).
The image was retrieved on 12 September, 2012 from an online .jpg file available from the National Diet Library (Kokuritsu Kokkai Toshokan 国立国会図書館) Digital Library from the Meiji Era (Kindai Dejitaru Raiburari 近代デジタルライブラリー) website, at http://kindai.da.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/871035/1.
Now look at the larger context in which the detail above appears:
and compare this with the corresponding page in the monolingual 1884 US edition. The presentation is radically different:
The US text, written for native speakers learning to read, routinely refers to the illustrations, as it does here. The bilingual Japanese text, for non-native learners of English, has removed most of the images, making the process of decoding even more mechanical and removed from real-world usage. In other words, there are different kinds of decoding here: the US textbook encourages the use of non-linguistic visual cues to help decode the text, while the bilingual text encourages dependence on one language to decode another.
References:
Barnes, Charles J (1884). Barnes’ New National First Reader.New York and Chicago: A. S. Barnes and Co. [First ed, 1883.]
Barnes, Charles J (Meiji 18 = 1885). Baānezu-shi nyū nashonaru dai-ichi rīdoru hitori annai バアーネズ氏ニューナショナル第壹リードル独案内. [English title: Hitori-Annai of Barnes’ New International First Reader. Takamiya Naota高宮直太, trans. Nihonbashi [Tokyo]: Sakakibara Tomokichi榊原友吉.