Autism, ESL and Second Life

Second Life (SL) is being used to teach ESL internationally with, admittedly, a selection bias favoring rich nations and the better-off in poor nations. People come to SL for many reasons, but the desire to learn spoken English is high on the list. Anyone who puts significant effort into building a "second-life" is seeking some supplement, in exactly Derrida's sense, to their first-life (Derrida, n.d.). ESL learners are supplementing their first-lives with a virtual immersion in the English language. In turn, this immersion is supplemented by resources available in SL but not in first-life immersion. Someone taught in school to read English but not to speak it would gain little from first-life immersion. In SL, he would find an abundance of ESL activities and even more activities, also conducted in English, for people who share some common interest. He could spend his entire second-life attending ESL activities and practicing English. He could type a word and immediately see and hear the English translation. He could use voice but also share text with a group or IM individuals.

            "Shiaida Palianta" is a British ESL teacher who has spent thirty years in Hong Kong teaching Cantonese speakers, many already using written English to communicate with Mandarin speakers and the outside world, to speak English. Globally, people literate in English far outnumber people who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. Many who are literate struggle to become comprehensible to native speakers defined as the largest sample of persons who are mutually comprehensible speaking English. A huge population literate in English has been drawn into SL by a keen interest in joining this conversation of the mutually comprehensible. They are in the right place.

            The best Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a better place for persons literate in English to learn to speak than the best first-world setting; the virtual supplements the actual in ways that make the actual a pale imitation of the virtual. Shiaida Palianta's ability to multi-task, using every available resource to keep everyone in their personal Zone of Proximal Development  (ZPD), is astonishing. During her English News Clips!, we read texts aloud and talk about them. Her co-host is 'Leee Megadon", a Mandarin speaker who keeps the group moving mostly via IMs and public text. The use of IM or text to provide scaffolding, either backchannel to individual users or shared with everyone, makes it possible to give help without breaking the continuity of conversation. All of us do this, often IMing or texting the written version of a word or pronouncing it for a speaker who can't say it but can write it. We also look at pictures and describe them while being primed for new vocabulary by leading questions and requests for further elaboration; a word is remembered when it is provided exactly when the learner is searching for just that word. Constant double coding of the spoken with the written plus pictures that make new words immediately useful works very well. Instant translation into English helps, especially since the translation is both written and spoken, as does access to the Internet.

            All of our regulars are literate but not (as defined above) native speakers. They come mostly from non-English speaking countries where English is required for graduation from high school or college. They, collectively, are an object lesson in what English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in the schools of a non-English speaking country typically can and cannot accomplish. All fit a single learner profile so closely that the same VLE and teaching style works for everyone. English News Clips! uses their literacy to help them learn to converse in a way that would not be possible without the tools available in SL.

            Admittedly, this only works because Shiaida Palianta spent years in Hong Kong teaching people already literate in English to speak. She then learned how to use the resources of SL to supplement what she could do in a first-life classroom. I would still claim that the supplement provided by SL makes possible  something that is more effective with this population than anything she could do in first-life. Remember also that we could never routinely meet in first-life. Given a computer, anyone anywhere can join us. SL makes it possible to deliver instruction fine-tuned to the needs of any sub-population. English Language Learners (ELL) who are autistic are one example. SL eliminates first-world location as a constraint on participation but not time. English News Clips! takes place at 5am SL (Pacific) time, 8am (Eastern) time and 4pm Moscow time.

            Much work has been done in VLE to help autistics remedy a lack of social skills (Mitchell, Parsons, & Leonard, 2007). Lack of social skills is the only disability many High-Functioning Autistics (HFA) suffer. SL provides a supplement to first world interaction teaching skills that are normally not taught but acquired, as is language, during normal development (Mangan, 2008). Autistics acquiring social skills are strikingly similar to ELL immersed without scaffolding; they and others are frustrated by their inability to "pick it up" by osmosis. The result is often Social Avoidance Disorder (SAD) as a secondary symptom of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

            An extensive support network has grown up in SL to provide safe spaces where autistics can interact without "faking  normal" to be accepted and rehearsal spaces where new approaches to being with others can be tried out in a risk-free environment where failure triggers not rejection but a "time-out" to explain what faux pas was just committed, followed by a discussion of how to avoid doing it again and/or deal better with the blow-back if it does. The potential of virtual worlds to improve the lives of persons suffering from life-long disabilities is potentially transformative (Stendal, Balandin, & Molka-Danielsen, 2011; Education Week, 2011). Enough people cross-trained in Instructional Design/Special Ed. to design the required VLE is the only limiting factor.

            I could not find ESL events created specifically for autistics in SL. To the extent that this population acquires language in atypical ways, which they definitely do, an event fine-tuned to those differences would make sense. Autistics do not, for example, follow the normal progression in learning their first language and probably would not in learning a second language (Eigsti, Bennetto, & Dadlani, 2007). One of Asperger's original cases went on to major in foreign languages (Wire, 2005). A few autistics speak with an authentic accent that is not the dominate accent of their home or neighborhood. These few are worth mentioning because all known cases were autistic; these few apparently were extreme examples of a greater capacity among autistics for exact mimicry. A talent for memorizing rules works to their advantage to the extent that languages are rule bound but is a source of frustration when exceptions are encountered (Wire, 2005).

            I know from personal experience working with HFA in SL that they very often prefer texting to FTF conversation because text fails to code context cues that they miss FTF and thus puts them at less of a relative disadvantage. Emoticons are useful as a substitute for this information. Simultaneously seeing text of what is being said helps whether they are speaking or listening (Yahya & Yunus, 2012). The idea that speaking is ephemeral and fleeting while text is something solid that one can refer back to when feeling lost was often expressed.  Autistics, especially the 20% functioning in the normal range of intelligence, tend to have larger speaking vocabularies and a better gasp of syntax and phonology than would be predicted by their IQs. The difficulties in communication suffered by this upper 20% are exclusively a matter of pragmatics (Seung, 2007). These difficulties are symptomatic of the lack of a theory of mind sufficient to allow inference from what is said to what goes without saying or goes unsaid (Colle, Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Van der Lely, 2008). Inferring this background provides most of us with the context of use and intention that is the field within which the utterance as figure is fixed. Failure to read this context creates the painful sense of being on-stage without a script that many HFA use to describe how lost and clueless they often feel during social interactions.

            HFA are natural linguists. The best way to teach them a second language might be to teach them everything a linguist would say about that language. To the extent that languages follow rules, HFA seem to have an absolute advantage in learning languages in any environment where their "why" questions about a spelling or a pronunciation can be answered by stating a rule. Even "there is a distribution rule that governs that pronunciation but I can't remember it off the top of my head" might work if students were also taught where online to go and how to search for rules the teacher can not remember. A VLE might be the best place to teach ESL for autistics. Online classes exclusively made up of this target population could be taught or the site could serve as the enrichmen/accommodation that made a language class hybrid for the one autistic in a first-life class.

 References

Colle, L., Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Van der Lely, H. J. (2008). Narrative discourse in adults with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 38(1), 28–40.

Eigsti, I., Bennetto, L., & Dadlani, M. (2007). Beyond pragmatics: Morphosyntactic development in Autism. Journal Of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(6), 1007-1023. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0239-2

E-Learning for Special Populations. (2011). Education Week, 31(1), S1-S22.

Jacques Derrida (1930—2004). (n. d.). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH3e

Mangan, K. (2008). Virtual worlds turn therapeutic for autistic disorders. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(18), A26.

Mitchell, P., Parsons, S., & Leonard, A. (2007). Using virtual environments for teaching social understanding to 6 adolescents with autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 37(3), 589-600. doi:10.1007/s10803-006-0189-8

Seung, H. K. (2007). Linguistic characteristics of individuals with high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 21(4), 247-259. doi:10.1080/02699200701195081

Stendal, K., Balandin, S., & Molka-Danielsen, J. (2011). Virtual worlds: A new opportunity for people with lifelong disability? Journal of Intellectual & Developmental Disability, 36e.

Wire, V. (2005). Autistic spectrum disorders and learning foreign languages. Support For Learning, 20(3), 123-128.

Yahya, S., & Yunus, M. M. (2012). Sight vocabulary acquisition in ESL students with autism: A case study. International Journal of Learning, 18(7), 367-384.