Examples of poor Critical Thinking in published work on SLA and ELT Part 1

I'm collecting examples of poor critical thinking in our field. More examples welcome!

1, Li Wei Translanguaging

In his discussion of translanguaging, Wei (2020) asks what happens when bilingual and multilingual language users engage in multilingual conversations. He finds it hard to imagine that they shift their frame of mind so frequently in one conversational episode, let alone one utterance, and. concludes that we do not think in a specific, named language separately, citing Fodor (1983) to resolve the problem. Wei says Fodor's Modularity of Mind hypothesis claims that the human mind consists of a series of modules which are "encapsulated with distinctive information and for distinct functions" and that language is one of these modules.

Discussion

?A critical reading of Fodor’s work makes it clear that Wei is plain wrong. Fodor consistently argued against the view that Wei attributes to him, i.e. he argued against any strong version of modularity (see his essay “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way”) and argued instead that the mind "contains" modules, while rejecting any strict demarcations among them. So, First step: Wei misrepresents Fodor.

Second step: Wei suggests that other scholars have wrongly interpreted Fodor's hypothesis as meaning that "the language and other human cognitive processes are anatomically and/or functionally distinct". Wei fails to give any reference to support this claim. He does no more than sketch a strawman version of Fodor's view, which nobody in the field has ever articulated.

Third step - the coup de grace. Wei goes on to triumphantly dismantle the strawman version and to claim that his refutation of this strawman is evidence for the usefulness of his own theory!

How good do you have to be at critical thinking to sniff out the embedded falacies displayed in this academic text?

Reference

Wei, L. (2018) Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39, 1, 9 - 30.

2. Adrian Holliday on Essentialism

Essentialism is to do with ‘Us-Them’ discourse. ‘They’ are essentially different to ‘Us’ because of their culture…… There’s no way we can be the same. There’s something absolutely separate about us and them. ……. Culture then becomes a euphemism for race. It’s essentially racist to imagine a group here and a group there who are essentially different to each other. That is the root of racism…….. ?Any group who is put over there and defined as being different to you, that is the basis of racism.

Grand narratives define us and them by fixity and division. We are different to those people, we have to be in order to survive. .. You brand your nation as being different to those people, in a superior or inferior way.

Holliday gives the example of a Chinese student who told him he’d turned down a fantastic job in Mexico “Because Mexico is not as good as Britain”. Holliday continues:

He had a hierarchy in his head. …. We all position ourselves …There’s no such thing as talking about culture in a neutral way; we just cannot. Everybody is positioning themselves in a hierarchy.

Holliday says:

I remember a long time ago I was in Istanbul interviewing colleagues. We were sitting right on the Bosphorus.?And everything that was East was inferior, and everything that was West was superior. This came out, very very clear; very very clear. Even inside Turkey. Yeh.?

Discussion

“Essentialism” isn’t so much a theoretical construct, it’s more the description of a bogeyman who doesn’t exist – a hopelessly-lost existential human being, a figment of Holliday's imagination, which he uses to argue against “positivism” and to support his own socio-cultural view, which is heavily influenced by Critical Social Justice Theory. ?

Holliday’s “argument” is this: Positivists (scientists and those who rely on empirical evidence and rational argument) are “essentialists”. Essentialists see the world in terms of “them” and “us”, where “they” have different, inferior cultural beliefs and practices to “us”. Since "our" culture is superior, "our" culture is racist: “it’s essentially racist to imagine a group here and a group there who are essentially different to each other. That’s the root of racism.”

The critcal rationalist objection to this argument is that it's circular - Holliday's collection of variables are so defined as to make up a perfectly-welded loop of assertions which defy refutation. The final piece in the loop - "since "our" culture is superior, it's racist"- only follows if you've previously gone along with all the anterior definitions Holliday has made about individuals, groups, ideology, and the rest of it. Holliday's argument starts with the demand that you see things the way he does and continues with the expectaction that you nod sagely in sentimental agreement when he trots out the "inevitable" consequences of his anecdotes. When he waves his arms around to demonstrate where human beings are in his hierarchy, when he tells you how very "dangerous" and inescapable cultural bias is, you're expected to be as convinced as he is by the force of this nonsense. Holliday relies on a view of ideologies that reflect feelings akin to religous belief rather than on critical thinking. So if you're tempted to join up to Holliday's view, you'll have to leave your reason at the door - only then can you be persuaded by Holliday's passionately-delivered, anecdote-rich, ideologically-imposed sermons.

Halliday makes ludicrous assertions about what the people arround him are thinking and about the beliefs they hold. He claims to be a mind reader, to know precisely and with certainty what the people he talks about - like the Chinese student and his colleagues in Istanbul - are thinking. Why, in the absence of a shred of evidence, should we believe his assertions about what's going on in the minds of all those he describes in his anecdotes? It's like he's so carried away by his epiphany about essentialism that he's forgotten he's talking about individual, human beings. It doesn't matter who they really are, or what they're like, because they "must" think the way he says they do. Why? Because they're essentialists.

The only explanation Holliday gives for why it's "quite impossible" for individuals like his Chinese student and his Turkish colleagues to escape the enormous, definng effects of their "culture" is that culture has already been defined as "that which has enormous, defining effect on you".

Let’s suppose we ask a group of real people - physicists, born and raised in France, who all adopt a realist epistemology and have a commitment to rational argument - to watch a documentary about life in Beijing, where the locals are shown going about their daily lives at work and play. Regardless of anything the French scientists might actually say about the people in the documentary, Holliday insists that their “positivist ideology” (their membership card to the "essentialist" club) will make them all think, consciously or not, “those people are essentially different to us. There’s no way we can be the same. There’s something absolutely separate about us and them." Consequently, they’re all racists. If the accused scientists hotly deny this charge, then Holliday will say that they’re "in denial" - they're simply blind to their racism. They can’t help themselves: they can’t escape their cultural influences or the consequences of their “positivist ideology”.

So here’s the question: Do we accept Holliday’s argument that the equation positivism = essentialism necessarily means that our group of French scientists are racists, or do we call out Holliday for making a series of unsupported, preposterous assertions?

To take some more examples,

How does Holliday know when people are imagining “a group here and a group there who are essentially different to each other”? Does he have some special antenna, or is it a necessary consequence of all his definitions which simply entail each other?

How does he know when people put a group “over there”? And where exactly is “over there”, anyway? Somewhere just far enough away so that they don't smell or otherwise offend "our" senses?

How does he know that his Chinese student had a hierarchy in his head, where Mexicans are inferior?

How can he report with such certainty that when he was sitting there with his Turkish colleagues, all of them without exception thought, precisely, that everything to the East of Istanbul was inferior, and everything to the West was superior?? ?

Every good MA student should be capable of identifying the weaknesses in Holliday’s argument. In the end, there are obviously some strong arguments for rejecting the classic case made for adopting a scientific approach to learning. But Holliday fails to comply with even the most elementary requirements of coherence in this video clip and it’s important to recognise that here, he’s talking baloney. ???

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3. Anderson on PPP

Assertion 1

Jason Anderson’s (2016) article “Why practice makes perfect sense: the past, present and potential future of the PPP paradigm in language teacher education” asserts the following:

While research studies conducted between the 1970s and the 1990s cast significant doubt on the validity of more explicit, Focus on Forms-type instruction such as PPP,?more recent evidence paints a significantly different picture.

Discussion

In fact, recent research does nothing to validate the focus on forms instruction prescribed by PPP (as opposed to other forms of grammar instruction such as, for example, recasts), and no study?conducted in the last 20 years provides any evidence to challenge the established view among SLA scholars, neatly summed up by Ortega (2009):

Instruction cannot affect the route of interlanguage development in any significant way.

Teaching is constrained by the learners’ own powerful cognitive contribution, and no recent research findings support adopting an appraoch like PPP, where it's assumed that learners will learn what they’re taught when they’re taught it.

More Assertions:

• we have no evidence that PPP is less effective than other approaches.
• writers in academia?have neither evidence nor theoretical justification for criticising coursebook writers.?
• The research on which writers such as Michael Long have based their promotion of focus on form is scant.

Discussion

Let’s get to the heart of the matter, which is really quite simple. Anderson bases his arguments on the following non-sequitur, which appears?throughout the paper:

There is evidence to?support explicit grammar instruction, therefore there is?evidence to support the “PPP paradigm”.

While there is certainly evidence to support explicit grammar instruction, and indeed, it is generally accepted that explicit?instruction has an important role to play in classroom-based SLA, this evidence can’t be used to support the use of PPP in classroom-based ELT. Explicit instruction can take many forms, including, for example, different types of error correction, different types of grammar explanation, and different types of explanations of unknown vocabulary. PPP, on the other hand, involves explicit (grammar) instruction of a very specific type – the presentation and practice of a linear sequence of chopped up bits of language. PPP?runs counter to?a mass of SLA research findings, and that’s that. Anderson appeals to?evidence for the effectiveness of a variety of types of explicit instruction to support the argument that PPP is an efficacious methodological approach in many ELT contexts. In doing so, he relies on the elementary fallacy of a glaring non-sequitur.

Just to be clear, pace Anderson, reliable research evidence which supports the assertion that some forms of explicit grammar instruction can contribute positively to SLA does not support the assertion that recent reliable research evidence supports the adoption of a PPP approach to ELT.

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4. Penny Ur

Here are four quotes from the Ur oeuvre:

1.?“There is no particular evidence that TBLT is any better than any other kind of methodology.”

False. There’s a great deal of evidence.

?“Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is an empirically investigated pedagogy that has garnered attention from language programs across the globe. TBLT provides an alternative to traditional grammar translation or present-practice-produce pedagogies by emphasizing interaction during authentic tasks. Despite several previous meta-analyses investigating the effect of individual tasks or short-term task-based treatments on second language (L2) development, no studies to date have synthesized the effects of long-term implementation of TBLT in authentic language classrooms. The present study uses meta-analytic techniques to investigate the effectiveness of TBLT programs on L2 learning. Findings based on a sample of 52 studies revealed an overall positive and strong effect (d = 0.93) for TBLT implementation on a variety of learning outcomes.

The study further examined a range of programmatic and methodological features that moderated these main-effects (program region, institution type, needs analysis, and cycles of implementation). Additionally, synthesizing across both quantitative and qualitative data, results also showed positive stakeholder perceptions towards TBLT programs. The study concludes with implications for the domain of TBLT implementation, language program evaluation, and future research in this domain.” (Emphasis added. Bryfonski, L., & McKay, T. H. (2017). TBLT implementation and evaluation: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research.) ?

2.?“Pienemann’s teachability hypothesis has only very doubtful implications for teaching.”

An unsupported opinion. Pienemann claims that his teachability hypothesis has clear and profound implications for teaching,

Many (me included) find Pienemann’s hypotheses coherent and well-supported by evidence, and if Ur wants to challenge Pienemann’s? ?Learner and Teacher Hypotheses, she should state her case, argue it, and offer evidence. ?Ur does nothing of this. Ur offers no well-argued case or evidence to support her view that we should take little notice of Pienemann’s hypotheses. Ur simply says what she says.

Ur sweeps aside the generally accepted view of SLA scholars that teachers are constrained by their students’ interlanguage development. She ignores Pienemann and all those who argue that students, not teachers, have the principle say in what thry learn, and she does nothing to alert teachrs to the massive research evidence which indicates just how wrong they are to assume that their students will learn what they’re taught when they’re taught it.???

?3.??“Researchers have very limited or non-existent teaching experience so their ideas on the pedagogical implications of their results may not be very practical and need to be treated with caution”.

False and fallacious First, many researchers (including Mike Long, Cathy Doughty, Peter Skehan, Pamela Foster, and dozens more) have extensive teaching experience. Second, lack of teaching experience doesn’t mean that the researcher’s findings are unlikely to have any useful, practical implications, even if the researcher doesn’t draw them out. This is a typical Penny Ur put down of the ivory tower academic, the point of which is to extol teachers to trust their own experience and keep using the materials, syllabuses ad assessment procedures she writes and recommends. ???

4.??It’s certainly possible to write helpful and valid professional guidance for teachers with no research references whatsoever”.

Yes, it certainly is possible. Which says nothing (sic) about whether it’s the best way to ensure that ELT is as efficacious as we can make it.??

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