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Stephen Krashen, an interview | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 52 25 February 2013 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Interestingly, native speakers also appear to experience fossilization. When I was 5 or 6, I was still pronouncing "three" like "free". The school system noticed this problem, and signed me up for pronunciation drills with a speech therapist. With a little bit of practice, the problem started to go away. Now, I'm guessing that I would have figured out the "th" sound on my own, sooner or later. But the process was very nearly identical to my French tutor trying to correct my tapped Rs in French. And I'm still struggling to acquire a natural and bug-free model of French gender. But if a French 6-year-old were still making gender errors, than an orthophoniste would pull out a copy of Bon genre Bon nombre and start playing games. Still, adults do seem to be more susceptible to fossilization than children. And if this is really the case, it would suggest that adults are more likely to require some kind of explicit intervention to fully exploit their input. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 52 25 February 2013 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a follow-up on @emb's post, I certainly agree that native speakers do exhibit imperfect acquisition of language. I would suggest that this is a factor in linguistic change.
On the question of gender, which is one of the most difficult things to master in French, I think that the problem is fundamentally one of the acquisition of the syntactic framework in its entirety. To master the gender system the learner must learn to think in a sort of linear fashion and always track the gender of the key nouns. The big mistake is to think in terms of isolated words. So, once you get past the word and its associated gender, you forget about it. This is precisely why people make gender agreement mistakes. The problem isn't really the gender of nouns, it's gender agreement that's tricky. We see something similar in English (and even more so in French) with verb forms that must agree in number with the headwords. We know that in English there are all kinds of funny situations where a plural form noun (.e.g. news) requires a singular verb and singular form nouns (e.g. the police) will require a plural verb. And things like "100 dollars is a lot of money." I would tend to think that children acquire proper syntax proper quite early. And they are very often corrected by parents and peers. Then they enter the school system at an early age. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4660 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 19 of 52 25 February 2013 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||
emk, I don't think it is really as clear-cut as this. Children get a ton of corrective input adults don't get - everybody and their dog feels free to correct children. Adults have to ask for feedback or look for the subtle signs. Correcting adults is usually "not done" and depending on the culture, sometimes even perceived as rude. Adults can can learn to self-correct through very careful listening or reading, or looking for signs when conversing with natives. But this is a skill like any other. Not all people have it. Nothing beats good feedback but in my opinion it doesn't need to be that often. In this case, I am advocating quality over quantity. If I need to choose, a private, a high quality lesson once in a month to pinpoint the problems and to outline how to work on how to get better will win every time. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6678 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 20 of 52 26 February 2013 at 12:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Aaron Myers interviews Stephen Krashen. Very interesting.Here you have the youtube video:
http://youtu.be/swW1vcG65x8 Edited by slucido on 26 February 2013 at 4:58pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 52 27 February 2013 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | ||
This interview is really interesting. When asked about his language learning experience towards the beginning of the interview, Krashen mentions that as a young man travelling in Europe in the 50s, he became interested in learning French and ended up in a class at the Alliance française in Paris. Krashen then points out that the class was all on grammar (a bad thing I suppose) but all in French (a good thing: comprehensible input). So he ended up learning French quite well. Interesting. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5735 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 22 of 52 28 February 2013 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've had success by plowing through a grammar book, not bothering to master it but just
be exposed to the correct grammar and maybe half-remember it, and then go all natural. That's what I'm doing with Russian, which I just picked up, and I don't have to memorize all those cases to be able to remember them when I encounter them in context, which means incomprehensible input becomes comprehensible input, and thus I crystallize the correct grammar rather than guessing incorrectly what the forms mean. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5563 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 23 of 52 28 February 2013 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Have you read "Me talk pretty one day" ? The first few pages, where they come to take him away, must be amongst the funniest things I have ever read. And all the stuff about french classes is good too. Not sure about the rest of the book, but it's worth the money just for that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5563 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 24 of 52 28 February 2013 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
If you live in France, you may continue to benefit from this, well into your adult life. I often (ok, maybe half a dozen times) have seen non-native interviewees on TV being corrected as to the gender of a word they have just said. (I think it may be due to the fact that if someone does actually speak the language to a high level, it is quite "startling" when they make minor mistakes, and you instinctively correct them. I suspect at a lower standard, they tolerate the mistakes) Edited by schoenewaelder on 28 February 2013 at 5:37pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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