The Worrying Growth of “Neurolanguage Coaching”

Have you noticed the number of people offering “Neurolanguage coaching” on Linkedin these days? They had a big meeting in Sitges recently and they’ve just opened a new website which explains that they’re all members of “the first accredited Language Coaching certification in the world”. They all offer “Brain Friendly Language Learning that brings Coaching and Neuroscientific principals into the learning environment, transforming language learning results for language educators and their learners worldwide”. I’ve made several attempts to find out what the neuroscience bit of the language coaching consists of, and I’ve been consistently fobbed off with baloney. Their leader, Rachel Paling, offered to meet me in Barcelona to explain, but was unable to put anything coherent in writing. ?Well, she's on YouTube, explaining “the neuroscience part of Neurolanguage Coaching”. Google it, or just take my word: it's pure Baloney. Ms Paling offers nothing but content-free waffle, she says precisely nothing about how she uses neuroscience research to inform her teaching, and yet she’s got thousands of loyal followers, not one of whom has yet provided any better explanation of the neuroscience part of Neurolanguage Coaching than she does. In this post, I’ll give the background and then suggest that the re-appearance of the “neuro” phenomenon in ELT should be treated with extreme caution. ??

Neuro-linguistic programming

??????????? Neuro-linguistic programming became a popular fad in ELT in the 1980s. It suggested that all learners are biased towards one sensory system, known as the preferred representational system or PRS. The Teachers could detect this preference through language use. Phrases such as “I see your point” were said to signal a visual PRS, while “I hear your point” signalled an auditory PRS. An NLP practitioner identified a person’s PRS and based their teaching around it. The framework involved, among other things, rapport-building, information-gathering, and goal-setting with students based on their preferred channel. While leading ELT gurus at the time, including Richards & Rogers, and Jeremy Harmer initially fell for this hogwash, it was soon found, through a number of studies, to have zero support from the empirical evidence, and Russell Mayne did much to spearhead an attack on NLP practices in ELT, including a very persuasive presentation at an IATEFL conference.

Russell Mayne's (2017) article pointed to the following studies:

• Devilly (2005) noted that research carried out on NLP ‘shed such a poor light on this practice . . . that researchers began questioning the wisdom of researching the area further’ (2005, p. 437).
• Tardif, Doudin, & Meylan (2008) dismissed it as a ‘neuromyth’.
• Lilienfeld, Lynn, & Lohr (2014), condemned it as ‘pseudoscience’.
• Roderique-Davis (2009) suggested that NLP masquerades as a legitimate form of psychotherapy, makes unsubstantiated claims about how humans think and behave, purports to encourage research in a vain atempt to gain credibility, yet fails to provide evidence that it actually works. (2009, p. 62). Roderique-Davis further suggested that the name itself ‘conjures up an air of scientific respectability’, which, he concluded was deceptive and had ‘no credible basis in neuroscience and no basis in formal linguistics’.
• Revell & Norman (1997) said that NLP employs complex sounding terminology such as ‘pragmagraphics’, ‘non-accessing movement’, ‘meta-model violations’, ?‘zone of congruence’ and ‘submodalities’. They concluded that ‘When the complex language is discarded, what remains is often a series of mundane adages such as ‘knowing what you want helps you to get it’.
• Heap (1989) cautioned editors and authors against presenting NLP as fact when it is ‘a series of unsubstantiated speculations about how the human mind operates’, while
• (Beyerstein (1990) dismissed NLP as an ‘outmoded view of the relationship between cognitive style and brain function’.

There’s a short introduction to neurolinguistics on YouTube, which starts with this:

If you’re looking for information about neuro-linguistic programming this video is not for you because neuro-linguistic programming has nothing to do with the field of neurolinguistics, nor with any field of linguistics.

Ten years ago, it looked as if NLP had been thoroughly discredited. Mention of it was removed from the latest editions of books by Richards & Rogers, Harmer, and others, nobody talked about it at conferences, it looked as if it had been safely chucked into the dustbin of history. But now, here come the neurolanguage coaches. They’re careful not to highlight any of the NLP stuff, but they make strident claims for their “brain-friendly” approach, which, they say, seeks to incorporate all the new discoveries made by neuroscience research.

?Neuroscience and neurolinguistics

??????????? Ping Li’s (2017) article in the Journal of Neuroscience focuses on the effects that learning an additional language can have on the brain. The main points he makes is that it remodels the functional network, and also its anatomical structure. The relevant brain regions involved in language learning become strengthened, and this is reflected in the increase of volume in grey and white matter. For example, the anterior cingulate cortex has been found to increase in size because it plays an important role in monitoring which language is being spoken and in resolving the conflict arising from the intrusion of the unintended language. The work of Li and his team provided the first evidence that anatomical changes could result from L2 learning in different contexts, for example, ?2D textbooks vs. 3D virtual environments.

So Professor Li has contributed to neuroscience research, showing that the learning of a new language leads to a significant reorganisation of the brain. However, and here’s the kicker, neither Prof. Li nor anyone else involved in neuroscience or neurolinguistics knows precisely how L2 learning differs from other non-linguistic experiences (e.g., spatial navigation) in remodelling the brain. Nor does anyone know what different kinds of remodelling result in learning distant vs. similar languages, or, crucially, how brain-behavior correlation data can be used to explain language learning. As Li puts it “These are only a few of the open questions that will define exciting new research in the future”.

In an earlier, but still much-cited article, Osterhout et al (2009) recognise that L2 learning is mediated by changes in the brain. However, they emphasise in the abstract that “little is known about what changes in the brain, how the brain changes, or when these changes occur during learning” (emphasis added). In their article, they show how modern brain-based methods are used to discern some of the changes that occur during L2 learning, and summarise preliminary results from three studies which indicate that classroom-based L2 instruction can result in changes in the brain’s electrical activity, in the location of this activity within the brain, and in the structure of the learners’ brains. But they recognise that have hardly started in the development of a theory that explains L2 learning in neurological terms, and that even their descriptions of the brain activity involved in L2 learning are open to various interpretations.

SLA Research

In SLA research, emergentist theories make use of connectionist models which reject the assumption made by Chomsky that the brain is a symbol processing device and argue that the brain relies on a type of computation that emphasises patterns of connectivity and activation.?MacWhinney, in keeping with the empiricist approach he adopts, uses evidence from studies in the field of cognitive neuroscience to help build his Competition model. The human brain is a huge collection of neurons?connected through axons. When a neuron fires, it passes activation or inhibition along these axons and across synapses to all the other neurons with which it is connected.?It's important to stress that this passing of information necessarily occurs in an all-or-none fashion. MacWhinney acknowledges that there is no method for passing symbols down axons and across synapses: brain waves can’t be used to transmit abstract objects such as phrase structures. Rather, the connectionists are forced to argue that the brain relies on a type of computation which emphasizes patterns of connectivity and activation, which is why models based on this type of computation are called ‘connectionist’ models.?“A fundamental feature of these models is that they view mental processing in terms of interaction and connection, rather than strict modularity and separation.?Although connectionist models often postulate some types of modules, they tend to view these modules as emergent and permeable rather than innate and encapsulated" [as claimed by Fodor, 1983, for example],MacWhinney, 1999). (Note that other psycholinguistically-based theories of SLA rely on the theoretical construct of a (modular) mind which makes use of short- and long-term memory, relies on executive functions, etc..) ????????

Just to flesh out the Competition Model a bit more, it explain language learning in terms of input events from the environment which are processed in the brain by simple inductions based on frequency and power laws of practice, rather than relying on an appeal to innate principles and parameters of the mind.?Cue validity is a key construct in this explanation. “The basic claim of the Competition Model is that the system of form-function mappings embodied in language-processing networks is acquired in accord with a property we will call cue validity. The single most common interpretation of cue validity is in terms of the conditional probability that an event X will occur given a cue Y, that is p(X/Y).? If this probability is high, then Y is a good cue to X.? The most straightforward prediction from this initial analysis is that forms with a high conditional probability should be acquired early and be the strongest determinants of processing in adults” (MacWhinney, 1999).

The Competition model claims that L1 transfer is a crucial part of L2 learning. The learner begins with a “parasitic lexicon, a parasitic phonology, and a parasitic set of grammatical constructs”.? Over time, the second language grows out of this parasitic status and becomes a full language in its own right” (MacWhinney, 1999). As far as the lexicon is concerned, this development is explained by the strengthening of direct associations from the L2 phonological form to the underlying referent, and by the restructuring of the meanings of some words.?

I give this very brief sketch of the Competition Model because it’s associated with connectionism, a movement in cognitive science which attempts to explain human intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks.? Neural networks are simplified models of the brain, composed of large numbers of units (the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the strength of connections between the units. The central task of connectionist research is to find the correct set of weights to accomplish a given task by “training” the network. The interest in connectionism is that it may provide an alternative to the modular theory of mind. If it can be shown that these artificial networks can “learn”, then successive advances in what is known about the brain – which is seen as a neural network comprised of neurons and their connections (synapses) – may be enough to explain cognitive processes and learning without recourse to the “black box” of the mind. ?

The growing interest in connectionist views and associative learning is reflected in the development of what has been dubbed the “emergentist” approach to SLA.? Ellis (1999) explains that emergentists “believe that the complexity of language emerges from relatively simple developmental processes being exposed to a massive and complex environment.”? The Competition Model is a good example of an emergentist approach, rejecting, as it does, the nativist UG account of language, and the nativist assumption that human beings are born with linguistic knowledge and a special language learning mechanism.?

In a special issue of the journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Ellis shows how language processing is “intimately tuned to input frequency”, and expounds a “usage-based” theory which holds that “acquisition of language is exemplar based” (Ellis, 2002: 143). The power law of practice is taken by Ellis as the underpinning for his frequency-based account, and then Ellis argues that “a huge collection of memories of previously experienced utterances” rather than knowledge of abstract rules, is what underlies the fluent use of language.? In short, emergentists take most language learning to be “the gradual strengthening of associations between co-occurring elements of the language”, and they see fluent language performance as “the exploitation of this probabilistic knowledge.” (Ellis, 2002: 173.)

In place of equating knowing a language with knowing a grammar, emergentism sees language knowledge as something that develops in the course of learning how to perform the primary communicative tasks of comprehension and production. This knowledge is viewed as a neural network that maps between forms and meanings, and further levels of linguistic representation, such as syntax and morphology, are said to emerge in the course of learning tasks. Statistical and probabilistic aspects of language play an important role in acquisition.?

These emergentist theories, particularly the work of Nick Ellis, are gaining considerable traction these days, and I think this encourages the view that neuroscience is having a big influence in SLA research. In fact, it isn’t. There are, of course, advances being made in psycholinguistics, but, despite what Rachel Paling says, neurolinguistic research is yet to “prove” ANY claim in this domain. ??

As Gregg (2003) says, “The use of the term ‘neural network’ to denote connectionist models is perhaps the most successful case of false advertising since the term ‘pro-life’”. In fact, virtually no modeller actually makes any specific claims about analogies between the model and the brain. Gregg cites Marinov: ‘Connectionist systems, … have contributed essentially no insight into how knowledge is represented in the brain’ (Marinov, 1993), and then Christiansen and Chater, who are themselves connectionists, who put it even more strongly: ‘But connectionist nets are not realistic models of the brain . . ., either at the level of individual processing unit, which drastically oversimplifies and knowingly falsifies many features of real neurons, or in terms of network structure, which typically bears no relation to brain architecture’ (1999: 419). Gregg adds that in particular, it should be noted that backpropagation, which is the learning algorithm almost universally used in connectionist models of language acquisition ?is also universally recognized to be a biological impossibility; no brain process known to science corresponds to backpropagation (Smolensky, 1988; Clark, 1993; Stich, 1994; Marcus, 1998b)”.

Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of connectionist models that play a part in an explanatory theory of SLA which avoids any appeal to Chomsky's nativism, they can't be said to draw on research in neurolinguistics to any appreciable extent. And neither can Rachel Paling or her followers be said to know anything about neuroscience - or about psycholinguistics for that matter. Psycholinguistics, as its name suggests, deals with the psychological aspects of language learning - including memory, individual differences, the effects of affective factors like motivation and anxiety, putative critical periods (now referred to as sensitive periods), the efects of corrective feedback, and many other matters which the Neurolanguage Coaches touch on. But they show as much ignorance about psycholinguistics as they do about neuroscience and neurolinguistics, and they show no signs of having developed a principle-based approach to teaching an additional language either.

Conclusion ??????

My point is a simple one: “Neurolanguage Coaching” has no justification that I can see for using the term “Neurolanguage”. Just like NLP, “Neurolanguage Coaching” has nothing to do with the field of neuroscience or neurolinguistics; it’s pure postering, and as Roderique-Davis said about NLP, it seems to be masquerading as a form of psychotherapy; it makes unsubstantiated claims about how humans think and behave; it makes myriad false claims about its use of neuroscience, and it fails to provide evidence that its use of neuroscience makes any real contribution to its teaching practices. The name is used to conjure up an air of scientific respectability, which is deceptive and has no credible basis in neuroscience.

Furthermore, to the extent that it dabbles in matters of psychology, it does so in the same way as it dabbles in language teaching itself: in a badly-informed, unprincipled way that relies more on bluff than any real knowledge of language learning. ?

References

Ellis, N. (2002) Frequency effects in language processing: a review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24, 143–88.

Gregg, K. The state of emergentism in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 19,2, 95–128.

MacWhinney, B., (Ed.) (1999) The emergence of language. Mahwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum.

MacWhinney, B., (2000) Emergence from what? Comments on Sabbagh & Gelman. Journal of Child Language 27, 727–33.

Mayne, R. (2017) Mayne, R. (2017). A critical look at NLP in ELT. English Australia Journal, 33, 1, 43.

Ping, Li (2017) Neuroscience and Second language learning. Journal of Neuroscience, 57, 3. ?

Osterhout, L. et al (2008) Second-language learning and changes in the brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21, 3, 509.