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Why is there so little research? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4608 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 73 of 81 07 February 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think almost anyone can learn a language, given massive exposure or immersion coupled by a long-term
committment from the individual. I don't think it makes any difference when you start. Adults can learn just as well as children from a cognitive point of view but kids usually find themselves in favourable learning situations, school for starters which provides daily compulsory immersion in a monolingual environment with free help on hand. If you throw a 15-year-old into a new-language situation for their final 2-3 years at school they will make great progress. And a person of this age is not really a child anymore but closer to a young adult. Certainly females of 15 are effectively young women. Give a 25-year-old, a fully-fledged adult in everyone's eyes, the same sort of learning opportunities, where learning the language is an absolute must for social and professional advancement and they will become fluent speakers. Will a residual accent remain? Probably, but speaking with an unusual lilt doesn't make you any less of a fluent speaker. Accent never correlates with true ability. Young kids learn their native language at a scary pace but there is nothing in their inherent intellectual make- up which makes them superior at picking up a second language. But they might get a better handle on the accent which makes them sound more "authentic" Edited by beano on 07 February 2014 at 11:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hobom Triglot Newbie Joined 4203 days ago 33 posts - 61 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 74 of 81 08 February 2014 at 12:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I tend to agree with Scott. Scientific psychology has demonstrated over and over that there is a vast amount of possible biases when it comes to people's opinion. That is why stereotypes and prejudices exist. It kind of makes sense, as a human you need to have an evaluation and expactation of people and things. However, it is far to difficult to assess things from scratch everyday, so people are likely to hold onto their opinions, disregarding possible evidence against their opinions. Iversen: You ended up speaking several languages, so you must be doing something right. However, did you try to objectively evaluate different methods? Learning one language with one method, another language with a different method, afterwards evaluating your success? I expect you did not, just as probably most individuals just go with subjective feelings. Let's take my experience with Assimil and Pimsleur when learning Chinese. If anybody asks me I would recommend Assimil over Pimsleur any time. I listened to the first twently lessons of Pimsleur, switched to Assimil and finished the first series. Subjectively speaking, Assimil was more effective than Pimsleur by far, however I spent more time each day studying Assimil than Pimsleur, so it is no wonder that Pimsleur did not work out for me. Even more, maybe Pimsleur (given the audio only format) would have improved my pronunciation or listening comprehension compared to Assimil? However, I am never going to find out, since I will be using Assimil the next time I start to learn a language, telling myself that obviously Assimil works better for me than Pimsleur. Many results are only visible in the long term, which exceeds the amount of time we usually consider. That is where science would be helpful, however a lot of people dont trust scientific results. A poster in this thread put it like this (I am paraphrasing): "why should I trust some data cooked up in a lab when there is plenty of anecdotical evidence for Michael Thomas?" I suppose some of that common distrust towars scinetists originates from people perceiving scientists telling other people what to believe. Nevertheless, I do believe that there might be very good reasons to distrust some scientific findings. Science told us 50 years ago, that the only way to learn a language was to respond to a certain cue with always the same response (Audiolingual method). It goes without saying that this casts a bad light upon science in general. Statistical data can be manipulated in a lot of ways, and research methodology can steer the result in a certain direction. Very much like normal people, scientists are not exempt from biases, just as their research isn't. SLA is a particularly difficult area of study, since there are so many variables which are almost impossible to control. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6583 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 75 of 81 08 February 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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Also, the 6 week challenge was originally started as just that - empirical research. Learn a completely new language for 6 weeks, for 30 mins a day, then let's all compare our progress.
As you know, by now the rules have changed completely (though it's still possible to follow the original rules, like a few people did for the Finnish experiment). There's also been an Assimil challenge and the only conclusion is that it's damn hard to stick to the official guidelines and even harder to deliberately make it your only resource. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 76 of 81 08 February 2014 at 6:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Much of my interest in looking at the science of independent language learning stems from the observation that
most people end up using many different tools and products. I am sure that all of us have little libraries for each language. How many people can truly say that they used a method from cover to cover? Instead, we end up using bits and pieces from all kinds of sources as we build our individual method. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4519 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 77 of 81 08 February 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Evidence
There are lots of different types of evidence in the World. Science provides a certain type, which while very valuable is limited in its scope and applicability. If we only rely on scientific evidence to make judgments we are simply going to be too limited in our ability to make effective decisions. We all have lots of beliefs based on non-scientific evidence, like "my mother loves me" or "Stephen Shore is one of the most important living American photographers", "communism sounds great in theory, but never seems to work in the real world", "investment bankers are greedy parasites that are destroying the wealth of future generations" etc. These are perfectly valid, non-scientific evidence-based beliefs. Are they true? Who knows? But even science also doesn't provide absolute truths. It is just a certain set of methods for collecting and evaluating particular types of evidence - and even within science the types of evidence and their evaluations differ greatly (compare biology vs physics). If I read a good review of a new Thai restaurant, that provides evidence about how well I will like the restaurant. I need to assess how well I weigh that evidence (Is the source reputable? Have I liked other restaurants the reviewer liked? Did the review seem reasonable etc). A review of a movie or a film or whatever is perfectly good NON-scientific evidence about the world. So unlike some of you, I think it's perfectly OK to read a review of Assimil and use this this evidence to make a judgment about whether this is an effective product. Which product is best? We can also collect more 'scientific' data on this if people want. It's just a matter of defining the question more precisely. Perhaps we have the general question "What is the most effective technique for learning a language?" But this is too broad a question to do a study on - you need to define both "what techniques you want to compare" and "what learning is" and it would be better to define a language to aid comparison. So a better question might be "How effective is MT vs Pimsleur vs Assimil at getting students to a level of B1 French?" You still need to define lots of things: what does 'effective' mean (time? length of retention? % of students that learn to a certain level etc); how do you define "B1" or whatever level; even what do you mean by "French" (professional vs slang; standard French - Québécois etc); and so on. But the study itself could be relatively straightforward: run three matched groups of people and measure their progress on learning French. As a follow-up you might want to look at how different groups learn (e.g., introverts vs extroverts; students vs retirees; etc). Would these studies be scientific? Sort of, but science isn't really about evaluating different commercial products (that's what reviews and personal testimony is for). What might prove more interesting scientifically would be to find that, say, in the initial study that Assimil was x3 more effective, and then try to find out why. But even then an answer to the 'why' would probably prove quite difficult to map back in any direct fashion to our understanding of language learning in the brain - which is probably no big deal as language learners interested in which techniques work, not why they do. Edited by patrickwilken on 08 February 2014 at 11:32pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5551 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 78 of 81 09 February 2014 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If one wanted to see abstracts on what research is being conducted by academics in
second language acquisition/learning - a good placewould be to start with the subject's dedicated journal - Second Language Research: http://slr.sagepub.com/content/by/year needless to say, few of the papers in the journal are of related to topics regularly discussed here. Edited by Elexi on 09 February 2014 at 6:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6689 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 79 of 81 09 February 2014 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Let me first mention that I have been through courses from the time I entered public scholl till I left the university, where I studied French and other Romance language using all the techniques that were available in the 70s. And now in my second learner period (from 2006) onwards I have constantly tried to find methods that gave results for at least one home learner, namely myself. And I have even drawn some conclusions aboout things I should have done to get better results, but didn't do, like speaking over Skype or emigrating to suitable countries, so it is not just a question about confirming my preexisting ideas. I have not deliberately tried studying one language with one set of methods and another with a totally different set, simply because one of my conclusions has been that you need to use a broad variety of methods to learn a language - and even though science is fun, it is not an option to block my progress as a language learner by avoiding techniques which I know have helped me before - and even less to force myself to spend days on things which I hate or which have proven to be a waste of time earlier. Unfortunately this dilemma also hampers scientific research in language learning, just as it is a problem for medical research. When do you stop the experiments and start using your preliminary results for the benefit of the guinea pigs? However there are certain language combinations where the my study situation has been different for external reasons. For instance I have only had Portuguese and Catalan TV a short period years ago, whereas I have had TVE in Spanish and RaiUno in Italian since times immemorial, and yet when I visit the relevant ares or count my words I find that I can function just as well in the 'TV-less' languages. That's actually surprising, and it runs against my immediate expectations. On the other hand I have never followed a course in Spanish, but I find it as easy to speak as French, which I have studied for years at the university. Right now my hunch is that my methods for vocabulary learning and acquisition of reading skills function very well, and I have travelled a lot of times in places where I could activate my passive skills - and apparently that has been adequate compensation for the lack of TV channels and courses. As you may remember I have given a reference to an article by Mondria, I have read the Stevick book referenced by Luke twice and I have read and commented on a lot of other articles and reviews, but I don't think it is exaggerated to say that 90% of the pedagogical research resources are channeled into studies of different aspects of class room education of school children, and for political reasons the preferred subject topic in my own country has been the situation of 2-3. generation immigrants. Edited by Iversen on 09 February 2014 at 7:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6583 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 80 of 81 09 February 2014 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know that those moving to Finland at 15 or older have to prove their knowledge of Finnish. Coincidentially I started learning it (properly) a week after I turned 15. I can't imagine a 15-year old without prior knowledge of Finnish going through the final years at school/lukio. Well, maybe if it's an Estonian or Karelian native speaker, but even then the general education would suffer. I don't think it's limited to "difficult" languages either. I believe emk posted something about how much time kids need to be on par with their peers. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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