McKinsey: 8 Business Technology Trends to Watch

The McKinsey Quarterly's latest edition (20 December, 2007) features an article on "emerging trends...transforming many markets and businesses."
Authors: James M. Manyika, Roger P. Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague.

Article links (free registration required):
McKinsey Quarterly article [text]

McKinsey Quarterly article [audio]

Article summary:

Managing relationships
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
Managing capital and assets:
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
Leveraging information in new ways:
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making business from information

SLA: Formulating an Effective Dual Language Policy

In decisions about language separation and allocation in a bilingual classroom, there are other ingredients and contexts that must be taken into account before formulating an effective dual language policy.

The aims of the school must be examined carefully, in terms of language preservation and second language competence.  School teachers are language planners, even if subconsciously.  If the children's minority language is to  be preserved, then separation may be a central policy element.  When teachers are more enthusiastic about majority (second language) competence, then different practices and outcomes, in terms of language allocation, will be desired.  Fewer language boundaries may be maintained, since loosening them helps ensure development of the majority language.  

The nature of the students must be considered in any policy regarding language boundaries and concurrent use, with policies and practices adjusted to age and grade level.  If language development is still at an early evolutionary stage, boundary setting is more important.  With older children, whose languages are relative well developed, the concurrent use of two languages may be more viable and desirable.  Older children may have more stability and separation in their language abilities.

Furthermore, this suggests that a static policy with regard to boundaries, and concurrent use within the school is less justifiable than a progressive policy that examines different applications across years and grade levels.  Early separation may be very important.  Later, in high school, a more concurrent use may encourage conceptual clarity, depth of understanding and cognitive development.

For a progressive policy it is necessary to consider different types of classroom communication.  When the teacher speaks more informally and simply to the class, the weaker language may be appropriate.  In practical activities, also, where there is context embedded help, the weaker language may serve well.  Where the cognitive level is higher in transmitting the curriculum, as with more complex, abstract ideas, either the stronger language or a bilingual approach may be needed.  Different types of classroom episodes, such as managerial, instructional and practical activity, constrain or allow comprehensible second language communication and concurrent usage.

Different dimensions of the school need individual discussions related to separation and integration of languages, for example in curriculum, whole school policies, classrooms and lessons.  At what level of organization should separation occur?  Our earlier discussion of language separation by curriculum material and medium of delivery showed that language separation is not a distinct issue from rational concurrent use, but merges into a consideration of integrated use.

Another important factor in deciding language separation issues is class language balance.  If all the children are native speakers of one language, it may be easy to determine a language allocation.  With mixed classes there are differing balances of majority and minority languages.  Who dominates numerically, linguistically and psychologically?  When the balance is tilted against language minority children, a clear separation, with the curriculum balance toward the minority language may be desirable.  Whether the student body is language minority in a subtractive or additive situation should also affect language allocation policies.

Where language minority children are the numerical majority, a slow change, rather that a sharp shift from language separation to concurrent use is advisable.  The minority language often risks perception as less powerful or useful, and lower in status, as children grow older.  Therefore, the minority language must be protected and keep a constant high profile in the school.

School language policy must take into account 'out of school exposure' to the first and second languages.  Sometimes, equal time is advocated to each language within the school, half the curriculum in one, half in the other.  However, if the child is surrounded by the majority language outside the school, on the street, in shops and through the media, then perhaps the separation balance ought to be adjusted toward the minority language in school.  'Out of school' exposure may also make some teachers hesitant about concurrent usage.

Replication and duplication of content threaten bilingual classroom methodology, since some pupils will not concentrate when the same subject matter is repeated in a different language.  However, repetition is sometimes pragmatically necessary.  Where there is a considerable variety of different home and preferred language, a teacher and bilingual assistant may need to repeat instruction in different languages.  There are some multilingual classrooms, in New York, Toronto and London, with a diversity of home languages among the children.  Replication of teaching in two or three languages may be essential for children in the early grades, so that as many as possible can comprehend.  This complicates debates about concurrent use and language boundaries.  One solution is small group learning, as seen in progressive British and North American primary schools.  This may allow establishment of some language boundaries, with different children addressed by bilingual teachers and aides, in their preferred language.

The use of non-repetitive and non-parallel bilingual materials, built in an incremental and well sequenced and structured manner, is valuable, particularly in high schools.  However, the production and availability of materials in many minority languages is difficult to achieve, and funding for such materials may be difficult to secure.

In a concurrent and purposeful use of two classroom languages, as advocated by Jacobson (1990), there is the danger of requiring teachers to manage an unnatural, artificial and highly complex language situation.  Where teachers are expected to manage concurrent use of two languages in a classroom, they are assumed to have a very high level of management skill, monitoring and reflection.  In reality, classrooms are busy, very fluid, often unpredictable places.  Teachers must react to the moment, to individuals who don't understand, with many unpredictable and spontaneous situations.  Students themselves have an important influence on classroom language uses, needing to share understanding (or lack of it) in the most appropriate way.  Classroom management of learning and behavior must be fluent, accepted by students, not abrupt and unpredictable.  Classroom language allocation must fit naturally, predictably, fluently and flexibly into curriculum management.

Funds of Knowledge: Genuine School Communities

Luis Moll (1992) develops valuable ideas for home-school relationships. He argues for the importance of identifying skills, knowledge, expertise and interests that families own, which can serve everyone in the classroom. Parents, grandparents and other community members can supplement teachers, providing what Moll calls funds of knowledge: 'cultural practices and bodies of knowledge and information that households use to survive, to get ahead or to thrive' (Moll, 1992, p.21). Funds of useful knowledge include agricultural information about flowers, plants and trees, seeds, water distribution and management, animal care and veterinary medicine, ranch economy, car and bicycle mechanics, carpentry, masonry, electrical wiring and appliances, fencing, folk remedies, herbal cures and midwifery, archeology, biology and mathematics.

Compare Moll's ideas with two other traditions of home-school relations. One traditional view is that language minority homes lack the social, cultural and intellectual stimulation and resources to enable children to progress well at school. Thus, teachers may have low expectations for school performance, particularly when students come from working class or materially disadvantaged backgrounds.

Another tradition is that effective teachers visit the home, to discuss particular problems with the parents, to enlist their help in schoolwork, and to request they help children with homework. This traditional view assumes that the school knows best and parents are valuable for encouragement they give children to adopt school norms and values.

Moll's (1992) radically different viewpoint about language minority homes is that parents and communities possess important historically developed, accumulated knowledge, abilities, strategies, ideals, ideas, practices and cultural events. These are regarded within a household and community as important to their functioning and well-being. Whether parents are farmers or construction workers, there are prized skills, knowledge and cultural practices worth sharing in the classroom.

If parents, community leaders, workers and artists are included in the learning experiences of children, home notions of culture are represented, valued, and celebrated. Different forms of worthwhile knowledge, experience and expertise are shared in the classroom, raising the self-esteem of children, the language minority group and the community. Hidden talents, oral histories, household skills and latent abilities are discovered and shared. These social, cultural and intellectual resources become important curricular elements.

SOURCE:

Baker, Colin (2000) The Care and Education of Young Bilinguals: An Introduction for Professionals. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. (pp. 84, 85)

REFS/FURTHER READING:

Delgado-Gaitan, C. (1990) Literacy for Empowerment: The Role of Parents in Children's Education. New York: Falmer.

Moll, L.C. (1992) Bilingual classroom studies and community analysis. Educational Researcher 21 (2). 20-24.

Moll, L.C. et al. (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice 31 (2), 132-141.

Multilingual Resources for Children Project (1995) Building Bridges, Multilingual Resources for Children. Clevedon; Multilingual Matters.

Bilingualism and Metalinguistic Awareness

From Colin Baker's The Care and Education of Young Bilinguals:

Young bilinguals sometimes have an enhanced ability to focus on the important content and meaning of language, rather than its external structure or sound. For example, a bilingual child is taught a nursery rhyme. Rather than merely learning the words by rote and concentrating on the rhyme, some young bilingual children seem to focus more (compared with monolinguals) on the meaning and story. Does this mean that bilingual children are less bound by the words, focused more on the core meaning?

An illustration comes from Leopold's famous case study (1939-1949) of the German-English development of his daughter Hildegard. Hildegard accepted very early that a word itself and its meaning were loosely connected, there was no absolute or inevitable link between them. Words were just arbitrary labels given to an object or idea. The name was separate from the object or idea itself. Leopold found that his stories to Hildegard were not repeated word for word. Plenty of substitutions and adjustments were made to relay the central points of the story.

(pp. 70, 71)

In a further experiment, Ianco-Worrall (1972) asked the following types of question: 'Suppose you were making up names for things, could you call a cow "dog" or a dog "cow"?' Bilinguals mostly felt that names could be interchangeable. Monolinguals, in comparison, more often said that names for objects, such as cow and dog, could not be interchanged. For bilinguals, names and objects are separate. This seems to result from owning two languages, which give the bilingual child and adult awareness of the free, non-fixed relationship between objects and their labels.

(p. 71)

...

One of the strongest lines of recent research in bilingual psychology studies the apparent ability of bilinguals to reflect upon the nature and functions of language. Simply stated, it appears that bilinguals have a greater awareness of language. This concept is commonly called metalinguistic awareness.

Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to reflect upon and manipulate spoken and written language. Language is inspected and thought about as a system to understand and produce conversations, rather than simply used. Such language awareness may include reflection on the intended meaning, sensitivity to what is implied rather than stated, and an analytical attitude towards language.

Research indicates that bilinguals, accustomed to owning and processing two languages, are better at analyzing them (Bialystok, 1987, 1988). They seem more able to look inwardly on each language and accumulate knowledge about the language itself, better able to regulate, manage and control their language processing.

One important possible outcome of the bilingual's greater metalinguistic awareness at an early age is earlier reading acquisition. Because bilinguals daily process two languages, they may acquire reading readiness skills faster. When this occurs, earlier reading may also relate to higher levels of academic achievement in various areas of the curriculum.

Not all bilinguals will have such metalinguistic awareness advantages. A study by Galambos and Hakuta (1988) found that such awareness is most developed when both languages are proficient at reasonably high levels. The effect of bilingualism on the processing of errors in Spanish sentences was found to vary depending on the level of bilingualism. The more advanced a child was in development of both languages, the better the performance on the test items.

(pp. 71, 72)

Baker, Colin (2000) The Care and Education of Young Bilinguals: An Introduction for Professionals. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

SLA: Teaching through the Silent Period

'The good-enough teacher', writes Britzman (1998: 42), 'must also help herself in tolerating the results of her ... own frustration'. That is to say, while some pedagogies may help alleviate silence, and in so doing make the work of the teacher easier, or tolerable, or in some cases possible at all, it is important to remember that alleviating silence may not always be the most useful (or even a possible) immediate objective for the learner. Put differently, when as teachers we consider how best to motivate learners, we must also attend to moments in the learning process when the question of motivation may simply not be relevant - moments that must be worked through. This may be one of the ways in which learner-centred approaches such as those recommended by the learner autonomy model might be useful - if they can help teachers to understand that both speaking and silence belong, ultimately, to the learner.

...

It seems to me that this kind of silence, and more specifically the idea of finding, or deliberately making, this kind of silent period, is a silence that opens up rather than shuts down - a silence that might hint at a way of thinking about learning not only a new language as such, but also other kinds of knowledge. For losses as well as gains area part not only of language learning, but also of the process of acquiring new knowledge or of learning a new theory, either of which can insist upon a psychical movement as well as a conscious intellectual shift into a new theoretical language and the corresponding theoretical milieu. As Eva Hoffman discovered, it is not enough just to learn new words; one must learn the new world as well. And at different times and in different contexts, we all have to do this. Certainly there is a sense in which this book is telling the story of a kind of language learning, for implicit in the work of triangulating several theoretical discourses is the task of making each of them speak to the others. I have attempted to negotiate a kind of conversation between psychoanalytic theory, social theory and SLA research, and in turn to weave that conversation into a dialogue with the narrative texts that seem so compelling - a new theoretical language, a new conversation.

I wonder whether, in this negotiation, this conversation, there might perhaps also be something that hints at some of the larger questions that relate not only to language learning but also to other kinds of learning that may interfere with individuals in profound and even disturbing ways. How do we learn? How do we give voice to our learning? And how do we tolerate learning, what do we do with the problem of articulating learning, when it is just too hard? It is subtle, this kind of educative hint that the concept of silence might provide concerning ways of thinking about learning theory, for example, or about theorising learning. But even so, like the kind of 'education through hinting, about hinting' that Phillips calls psychoanalysis, such hints might act as a hopeful' ...kind of go-between between teaching and seduction, sustaining both a complicity and a difference' (Phillips, 1999: 109) - embodying, in other words, their own conflicts, their own ambivalence, and their own irreconcilable oppositions, but also, as psychoanalysis keeps insisting, their own wishes and desires.

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 124, 125.

I find it fascinating that Granger finishes with a final arc that wonders whether questions of 'silent periods' should only be asked by language teachers, or whether far broader applications for this kind of theory can be formulated within the education community. In a sense, she has taken us back to the womb/childhood to investigate psychoanalytically, but she has also swung the discussion back to how we absorb and finally synthesize challenging theoretical discourses, even when they're in our native language.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality.  The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

George Steiner.

SLA: Knowing Learners through Autobiography & Memoirs

How - and what - can educators, specifically second-language teachers, come to know about their students and those students' needs? Perhaps, given the complexity of silence in second language acquisition, and the complexity of desire and ambivalence in learners, and the further complexity of the lives and the work of educators, such direct knowledge is not possible. And this gives rise to other questions. How can we learn to live with this lack of direct knowledge? How can education tolerate the partiality of what it can know?

If I am, perhaps, a little less hopeful than Riley (1999: 10) about the possibility of obtaining 'a clear idea' of the language learner's identity from the learner himself or herself, I am nevertheless convinced that, despite or even through silence, ways can be found into relations between teachers and learners that make both relating and learning possible. We may not have a 'clear idea' about a particular learner, but we do have hints.

Some hints can be taken from memoirs and autobiographical writing of the kind examined in this study, and from interpretations of that writing. The first hint might be a very gentle one, the simple reminder that self-writing gives us of the existence in each individual of a multi-layered inner world, and of the importance of tolerating 'the particular peace its author has made between the individuality of his or her subjectivity and the intersubjective and public character of meaning' (Grumet, 1990: 324). For in the complex daily work of education, with its demands and vicissitudes, and its foregrounding of overtly-manifested and readily-observable learning processes as means to perceptible, tangible, quantifiable products of learning, there is a tendency to abstract the learner's - and the teacher's - less visible, subjective and unconscious experiences. This is simply to say that it is quite a difficult thing to remain mindful of the lives of the persons involved in education, to begin to 'recover human feeling and motivation for studies of education that [have] become anonymous and quantitative' (Grumet, 1990: 322).

A second hint that might be taken, from reading and perhaps also from writing autobiography and memoir, is a kind of intimation of relatedness, different from generalisation, but offering the possibility of thinking about shared aspects of experience among, in this case, second-language learners. Not certainty, we must remember, but possibility: not that one individual's learning must, but it might, be a little like another's. Second-language learners in mid-process may not be able to speak about their experience, and there may be ethical reasons not to demand that they do so, but educators might take hints about those silences from the narratives of others. And those hints, once taken, may give us something to ground our intuition and guide our pedagogy, and allow for the possibility that educators can take care without taking control.

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 121, 122.

SLA: Parapraxis - no mistakes!

...what in common parlance might be called 'innocent mistakes'. But for psychoanalysis 'there is nothing innocent about forgetting, slips of the tongue, jokes, indeed all forms of parapraxis - those bungled actions that point elsewhere even as they can be observed as interfering with daily life' (Britzman, 1998: 68). Anna Freud explains:

Examining the small mistakes in the everyday life of human beings, such as forgetting, losing, or misplacing things, misreading or mishearing, psychoanalysis succeeded in demonstrating that such errors are always based on an intent of the person who makes them ... Psychoanalytic investigation established that, generally speaking, we forget nothing except what we wish to forget for some good reason or other, though that reason is usually quite unknown to us. (A. Freud, 1974: 81-82)

And Ehrman and Dornyei expand on this noting that, according to the psychoanalytic principle of psychic determinism, 'behaviour is meaningful and not random or accidental ...' and 'individuals ... [unconsciously] give each other messages about their feelings and wishes' (Ehrman & Dornyei, 1998: 11)

(p. 105)

Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. p. 105.