Enclothed cognition

The effects of the environment on test-takers appear to be manifold.

I have written before about the difference the colour red can make to a learner's levels of accuracy.

It now appears that not only is colour important to levels of success, along with room size, but also the type of clothing a test-taker wears.

Welcome to the world of  'enclothed cognition' as described by Hajo Adam and Adam D Galinsky in a recent paper of the same name.

Automatic i+1

Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

Good advice for snipers and now teachers too, apparently.

Daniel Kahneman recalls in Thinking, Fast and Slow how he began his career in the fledgling discipline of cognitive pupillometry.

He and his colleague discovered that the pupil expands and contracts in response to mental cognition.

The harder the task, the more the pupil expands, at least up to a point.

That point is reached when the average person is asked to add 3 to every digit in a four-digit number.

If people are asked to do anything more complex than that, it is deemed too hard and the pupils contract back to normal.

Equally, tasks which require little mental effort, such as small talk, reveal only tiny enlargements of the pupil.

Lethe and lesson management

You are what you remember, not what you experience.

At least according to Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate and author of last year's outstanding book - Thinking, Fast and Slow.

This partly came to light when he conducted a study on people undergoing colonoscopies.

The first group underwent shorter procedures, and the second group longer ones.

When asked to rate the total amount of pain they had experienced (this was before colonoscopies were routinely accompanied by anaesthetics), surprisingly the first group recorded a worse experience.

How could this be if they experienced significantly less time under procedural duress?

iPower

What is today's BE lesson must-have?

The sine qua non of the pedagogic encounter?

It certainly isn't the course book.

Often enough, it's not even a room - at least a physical one.

No, the  indispensable piece of kit for every BE encounter seems to be the iPad.

Specifically, it is the learner's iPad.

But why?

Participle clauses: little objects of desire

Is there a connection between what a learner pays and what a learner does?

A group of learners pays considerably less than someone receiving individual tuition, but is the concomitant to that a lower level of effort and, consequently, achievement?

I was set wondering about this after reading Seth Godin's post 'Do it tomorrow'.

In it, he argues that people often confuse the value of advice with what they pay for it, even though there is often little correlation.

More intriguingly for BE, he proposes that, 'One of the most effective ways to get your ideas implemented is to charge a lot for them.'

This certainly sounds appealing on several different levels.

Anchoring (ii): time management tools

Last week I suggested we need to anchor our learners' expectations with appropriate numbers.

One of those numbers is 80%.

That's not the number of students who fail to use the present perfect correctly, but a reference to Woody Allen's oft-quoted suggestion that 80% of success is showing up.

This number applies to language learning too.

It takes discipline and effort, showing up day in and day out.

But how do we help our learners meet that  requirement?

Anchoring

We may teach language, but numbers play an important role in our profession.

'How long will it take to learn this skill/lexical set/language?' is a key question, but the figures used to answer this will vary enormously.

And they will vary not just because of objective reasons, but because of subjective ones too.

Such subjectivity arises due to a concept which in behavioural economics is called anchoring.

Anchoring refers to the cognitive bias which underpins our decision-making.

For example, when people buy computers, they often compare them in terms of memory capacity because it is a figure with which they are familiar - 250GB is better than 200GB.

However, this may skew our understanding of computers and lead us to ignore more pertinent factors, such as RAM size and processing power, when making our purchasing choice.

Such skewing is also at work in the classroom.

Code red

Do your learners take tests?

If so, what colour will they see in the room where they take the tests?

And how high will the ceiling be?

Perhaps, like me, you've never thought about it.

However, it turns out these apparently incidental details can have an effect.

Choice architecture

There is no such thing as a "neutral" design.

So say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler in their now-classic book, Nudge.

Every design you can think of, from canteen displays to school layouts, nudges people to make one decision rather than another.

They call the people who craft these designs 'choice architects'.

According to Sunstein and Thaler, 'a choice architect has the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions.'

Educators, for them,  are choice architects par excellence, organising the context for their learners' education in a 1000 different ways.

Seating is one of the more obvious types of context in a classroom.

Comfort

From Cleopatra's burnished throne to the leather and wood electric variety, the chair has many guises.

My favourite is the armchair, simply because it is the most comfortable.

I have long dreamt of an armchair I could take with me into the mountains or to the beach.

This is simply so that I may enjoy nature's bounty in comfort, rather than perched on a wet rock, or wedged in between a million pebbles.

This small wish was finally granted  this week when I chanced upon the elegant Flux chair.

Finally, a lightweight foldable armchair enabling me to sit down wherever I want.

My dream has come true.

The distracted goldfish

'We are not only what we read,' says Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid.

  'We are how we read.'

The internet has changed both.

We read 140-character Tweets, Facebook updates, news tickers, digests, digests of digests.

And we don't actually read either; we flit and we float - our attention permanently diffuse.

We skim sideways across the net, like a long-legged fly, touching only faintly any text.

How can anyone learn a language in such conditions?

More pointedly, how can anyone be taught a language in such conditions?

BELF-U-Like

Rory Sutherland, one of the UK's leading ad-men, tells a great story about how Frederick the Great of Prussia re-branded the potato.

Frederick was very keen for his subjects to adopt the potato in order to stave off famine and stabilise the price of bread, so he made them a compulsory crop.

Frederick's subjects, however, were less keen, claiming they were not even fit for dogs to eat.

They hated the potato.

Despite meting out some severe punishments, the potato, like the 3rd person 's', simply did not take.

So Frederick resorted to Plan 'B'.

8 out of 10 BE students prefer it

The other day, a student of mine was discussing a few idioms with me.

He's an upper intermediate student, and I was advising him that he didn't need to master idioms just yet.

I suggested that native speakers tended to use idioms a fair bit, but the majority of English speakers, non-natives speakers, did not use them very frequently at all.

My student digested this information for a few seconds.

Business English: Working in the Lemon Market

Sam Levenson once remarked that we must learn from the mistakes of others because we  can't possibly live long enough to make them all ourselves.

Nowhere is this advice more pertinent than in the case of second-hand, or as Americans more tellingly describe them, used cars.

Most buyers of used cars are beset by the problem of asymmetrical information.

Unlike the seller, they don't know if the car is in good condition or not.

In all likelihood, they don't even know what 'good condition' is either.