Expedition Learning:

English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

Justin M. Thibedeau
Michigan State University
MI 831 Theories of Games and Interaction for Design

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

English Language Instruction for Another Billion People

Current estimates put the number of people studying English as a second or foreign
language around the world at well over one billion, making English the most learned foreign
language in history (Statista, 2016). This number is expected to reach a staggering two billion
by 2020 (British Council, 2013), yet the demand for English language instruction has already
outstripped the available pool of qualified teachers, native speakers or not (The Economist,
2015). Low and middle income countries around the world require aid in the provision of quality
English instruction for secondary public education systems serving m
illions of students.
Without a workable knowledge of English, navigating our globalized world is difficult.
More than half of the worlds technical and scientific publications are in English (Huttner, 2015),
leading academics from every language background to collaborate and publish in English in
order to reach a larger audience. English is the dominant language for many software programs
and about 80% of the information stored in the worlds computers is in English (Invernizzi,
2010). An activist involved in the uprisings in Libya who was asked why he had chosen English
for social media over Arabic or French answered simply, Because thats where we go when we
want to influence the world (British Council, 2013).
Far from moving towards a monolingual world, English has simply become a universal
means of communication, and the majority of English learners use i t to communicate with
non-native English speakers. Germanys President, Joachim Gauck, expressed an ideal goal of
multilingualism as the sense of being at home in your mother tongue, with all its poetry, as well
as a workable English for all of lifes situations (British Council, 2013).
Mandatory English Without Support
According to the latest EF English Proficiency Index, a rise in a countrys English
proficiency was connected with a rise in per capita income and individuals with exceptional
English compared to their countrys level earned 30-50% higher salaries (McCormick, 2013).
These statistics are enticing and have led many countries to make English compulsory in
schools without having considered the necessary elements for successful foreign language
instruction. A 2015 article in The Economist, The mute leading the mute, provided an update
on the lack of progress such policies have made. In Mexico, four-fifths of secondary-school
graduates had absolutely no knowledge of English, despite having spent at least 360 hours
learning it in secondary school, and one in seven teachers had no English whatsoever (The
Economist, 2015). In China, just over one million English-language staff teach over 200 million

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

Chinese pupils (The Economist, 2015). In many places where teachers lack fluency, English is
approached as a subject to be taught about, rather than a language to be taught in. In the end,
the benefits of English are seen predominantly by urban elites, who have access to a better
standard of teaching mostly delivered through private education (De Lotbinire, 2011).
First Language Influence and V
ygotskys Zone of Proximal Development
Those EFL students without proper instruction are particularly prone to first language
(L1) influence. As the linguist Stephen Krashen writes, first language influence seems to be
strongest in acquisition poor environments, where natural appropriate intake is scarce and
where translation exercises are frequent (Krashen, 2002, p.66). Students lack of experience in
practical English beyond grammar rules and worksheets, combined with a shortage of
comprehensible input, sets them up for disaster when they are expected to communicate.
According to a hypothesis first proposed by Leonard Newmark (1966), performers who are
asked to produce before they are ready will fall back on syntactic rules of their first language
while speaking the second language (Krashen, 2009, p.27).
Consider here Vygotskys zone of proximal development, which describes tasks a
learner is capable of doing with just enough assistance and guidance to allow the learner to
progress, but no more (Van Eck, 2007, p.287). This zone is where effective learning occurs.
However, when pushed out of ones ZPD, EFL students revert to their L1 syntax. These
utterances can allow the student to momentarily perform beyond his or her level of competence
but at the cost of errors in English syntax, such as word order and grammar tense.
Unfortunately, if the incorrect utterances are effective in communication, it is more likely the
student will continue using them and they will become fixed.
L1 influence within a students spoken or written output should serve as indicators for
when content has surpassed a learners ZPD. Alla Rozovskaya and Dan Roth of the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied written errors from non-native English students of nine
different L1 backgrounds: Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, French, German, Italian,
Polish, Russian, and Spanish. When examining the errors, clear patterns emerged that could be
traced back to L1 influences. For example, Mandarin and Slavic languages do not include
articles (a, an, the), and the results showed that Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian, and
Mandarin speakers were roughly three to four times more likely to make mistakes using articles
than speakers of French, Italian, or German, all of which do have articles (Rozovskaya and

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

Roth, 2010). Distinguishing between general mistakes and L1 influence can determine the next
step for the student as well as appropriate feedback.
Piagets Theories of Assimilation and Accommodation and Scaffolding
Once language instructors have identified L1 influence, Piagets cognitive learning
theory of assimilation and accommodation can shed some light on different kinds of L1
influence. To a large extent, learning basic vocabulary of concrete nouns in a foreign language
falls within assimilation. For example, an English-speaking student knows the word desk, and
upon learning the Spanish word escritorio, transfers the same meaning to the new word. The
learner easily integrates this new knowledge into his or her existing knowledge, or schema (Van
Eck, 2007, p.286).
Accommodation, on the other hand, requires much more effort than assimilation,
including replacing or reconstructing existing ideas (Van Eck, 2007, p286). Of all the languages
included in the Rozovskaya and Roth study, Mandarin has the greatest linguistic distance, or
variance, from English. For example, 30-40% of English vocabulary have related words, called
cognates, in Spanish, albeit with different pronunciation (hospital = hospital). Mandarin has
almost zero (examples like engine = ynqng or coffee =
kfi are phonetic
translations). As the study revealed in error counts for verb form, Mandarin speakers face
many tenses in English grammar that do not exist in their L1 (Rozovskaya and Roth, 2010).
While assimilation of basic vocabulary still requires instruction and practice, the learning
process is fairly straightforward. If content requires accommodation, then extra scaffolding must
be provided. Based on a students first language, instruction can predict when more incremental
scaffolding steps will be needed in order to preempt L1 influence.
Solution: Pedagogical Agents (ITS), Situated Learning, and Distributed Cognition
Young, et al. (2012) found that novices assimilate to the target language more
effectively when collaborating with a native speaker than with other novices or artificial systems
(Tomorszki, 2014, p.10). However, given that English learners outnumber native speakers
nearly 4 to 1, and there are already shortages of qualified teachers, including non-native
speakers, we must look to digital solutions for aid. For the reasons listed before in this paper,
one prerequisite for any digital game designed to aid EFL teachers and students around the
world, is the inclusion of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) with expert models of both English
and also the players first language. With these two models embedded, major distinctions in

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

syntax can be identified in order to 1) maintain the players ZPD and preempt common L1
influence and 2) predict when extra scaffolding will be necessary due to content
accommodation. While this is not a one-to-one lesson with a native speaker, ITSs have shown
a .3 to 1.0 standard deviation increase in learning and for one billion English language learners
around the world, this is quite significant (Corbett et al., 1999).
This ITS can be embedded into situated learning scenarios via various pedagogical
agents. A game which utilizes situated learning would greatly promote interactivity as
knowledge and skills acquired during such games are rooted to those experiences in
conceptual layers in order to hone better recall in the virtual and real world (Tomorszki, 2014,
p.5). Rather than have students link English to the U.K. or U.S., a foreign language to foreign
lands, they could apply English to their already familiar surroundings. For example, taking on
the position of a tour guide in their own country would provide plenty of opportunities for
practicing listening, speaking, reading, and writing. By making the game multiplayer, students
leverage the distributed cognition of other classmates in order to progress their learning. Most
importantly, students would be using English to talk about and share their own culture, using
English as a global medium to share local identities and messages which can be accessed by
others from around the world (British Council, 2013).

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People

References
British Council. (2013). The English Effect. Retrieved from:
https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/english-effect-report-v2.pdf
Corbett, A.: Anderson, J.; Graesser, A.; Koedinger, K.; and VanLehn, K. (1999). Third generation computer tutors:
Learn from or ignore human tutors? In Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of Computer-Human Interaction,
85-86. New York: Association of Computing Machinery.
Huttner-Koros, Adam. (August 21, 2015). The Hidden Bias of Sciences Universal Language. The Atlantic.
Retrieved from:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/08/english-universal-language-science-research/400919/
Invernizzi, Emanuele. (2010). Which English should we use? From local Englishes to English as a Lingua Franca.
Retrieved from: http://www.euprera.org/?p=89
De Lotbinire, Max. (July 5, 2011). Research Backs English as Key to Development. The Guardian. Retrieved from:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jul/05/research-backs-english-language-delotbiniere
Krashen, Stephen. (2002). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Retrieved from:
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/sl_acquisition_and_learning.pdf
Krashen, Stephen. (2009). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Retrieved from:
http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf
McCormick, Christopher. (November 15, 2013). Countries with Better English Have Better Economies. Harvard
Business Review. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2013/11/countries-with-better-english-have-better-economies
Newmark, Leonard. (1966) "How not to interfere with language learning." Language Learning: The Individual and the
Process. International Journal of American Linguistics 40: 77-83.
Statista. (2016). Most spoken languages in the world (speakers and native speakers in millions). Retrieved from:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266808/the-most-spoken-languages-worldwide/
Rozovskaya, Alla and Roth, Dan. (2010). Annotating ESL Errors: Challenges and Rewards. NAACL10 Workshop on
Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications. Retrieved from:
http://cogcomp.cs.illinois.edu/papers/RozovskayaRo10a.pdf
The Economist. (February 14, 2015). The Mute Leading the Mute. The Economist. Retrieved from:
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21643148-why-are-countries-failing-so-badly-teaching-english-mute-lea
ding-mute
Tomorszki, Kristen R. (2014). Potential Use of Digital Games in Foreign Language Education. Retrieved from:
http://www.academia.edu/7687293/Potential_Use_of_Digital_Games_in_Foreign_Language_Education
Van Eck, RIchard. (2007). Building Artificially Intelligent Games. Idea Group Inc. Retrieved from:
http://www.academia.edu/1856556/Building_Artificially_Intelligent_Learning_Games

Expedition Learning: English Language Instruction For Another Billion People