A continuation of the endless I/O talk (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

A continuation of the endless I/O talk
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

Message 97 of 126

30 November 2008 at 9:54am | IP Logged

slucido wrote:

Cainntear wrote:

It cannot reinforce the correct behaviour, because your behaviour is statistically verifiably incorrect!!

It's easy. Reinforce the correct behavior (positive reinforcement) and ignore the wrong behavior ( extinction)

Slucido, the "correct behaviour" is "these methods", but your method has reinforced "this methods", therefore is demonstrably not reinforcing the correct behaviour, so your method is clearly behaviourally incorrect. If you can't see this... well...

Cainntear wrote:

* In your framework there is no "good", "bad", "right" or "wrong"; there is only "reinforcing" and "non-reinforcing" and these mean whatever you want..

slucido wrote:

It's your responsibility to define what's good, bad, right and wrong. Then you decide to reinforce the right behavior and the extinction for the wrong behavior.
The framework is very easy and powerful.

Easy and powerful... and a waste of everybody's time.

Why?
Because a learner does not know the correct behaviour -- only one who has learned the behaviour can know the behaviour.

OK, it is possible to "intellectually" know behaviours and analyse them in order to break them down for learning, but this is a bigger job than the learning process itself. In any language, a complete analysis of behaviour is a job that no man can complete in his lifetime -- as yet the entire academic community has failed to produce a complete model of English or Spanish, two of the most widely used and studied languages in the world.

slucido wrote:

My framework is easy:

Find out OUR FAVORITE method and KEEP practicing it.

Then you'll have to indulge me in a bit of reductio ad absurdum. My favourite method is reciting the lineage of the kings of France while flying a kite and listening to African tribal music, and tapping my left foot to the beat on a beach between the hours of 2pm and 4pm.

When your definition does not logically imply that I can learn a language by doing so, people may start listening to you.
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Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6108 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes

Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

Message 98 of 126

30 November 2008 at 10:05am | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

My favourite method is reciting the lineage of the kings of France while flying a kite and listening to African tribal music, and tapping my left foot to the beat on a beach between the hours of 2pm and 4pm.

Please, follow Prof. Arquelles's footsteps, and put your favourite method on Youtube.
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zerothinking
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 6371 days ago
528 posts - 772 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 99 of 126

30 November 2008 at 12:59pm | IP Logged

dswans wrote:

zerothinking wrote:

Isn't it funny how I automatically know that its a spelling error? Anyway, usually
it's a typo (nothing but a hit and miss on the keyboard) and not a direct mistake.
Orthographic mistakes are not what I think Volte was talking about anyway. They aren't
the mistakes that matter most. Spelling and writing is, after all, unnatural. What
matters is the usage of the language, its grammar, form, and idiomatic usage. I
believe that's what Volte was saying. For instance, I don't know if this is a typo or
not but in the first sentence in your response to me you have forgotten pluralize a
word. These are the types of mistakes that natives invariably never make. These 'non-
native' mistakes are what Volte would be talking about.

The above text contains an example of a 'native' mistake. In the first line quoted
above, the word 'its' appears. This is the possessive form of the pronoun it. The
appropriate word here is 'it's', a contraction of 'it' and 'is'. The words are the
exact same in oral communication, so a speaker cannot 'hear' that this is a mistake.
Furthermore, I would deduce that it is a simple typographical error, as 'it's' is used
properly in the next sentence:)

On the topic of I/O, I can only say that output has very little value until it is good
output. I find various aspects of German grammar difficult because I have made so many
repeated mistakes in output. My repeated mistakes provide non-native input and thus
interfere with my ability to see or hear when something is grammatically incorrect. I
am not aware of a method of preventing my brain from taking my output as legitimate
input. Thus, I must conclude that learner-generated output (as opposed to shadowing or
other carefully copied output) at the early stages of language acquisition is a very
bad idea.

I don't really count spelling as a mistake. The written language is unnatural and has
to be explicitly taught. The spoken language is what I'm concerned with. I know the
difference between it's and its and yet I invariably will end up using it incorrectly
here or there.

I agree with the next paragraph. If your output is bad you reinforce your mistakes. I
think keeping quiet for a little while is a good idea.
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zerothinking
Senior Member
Australia
Joined 6371 days ago
528 posts - 772 votes

Speaks: English*

Message 100 of 126

30 November 2008 at 1:13pm | IP Logged

slucido wrote:

zerothinking wrote:

I believe that's what Volte was saying. For instance, I don't know if this is a typo
or not but in the first sentence in your response to me you have forgotten pluralize
a word.

When natives write, they make horrendous mistakes. When natives speak, they make
horrendous mistakes. When they use different dialects, they don't understand between
themselves. And they usually say that people from other dialects don't talk properly.

You only need reading this forum or other forums, including this thread.

zerothinking wrote:

These 'non-native' mistakes are what Volte would be talking about.

And you tell us this argument isn't fallacious: ad hominem plus red-herring.

If I understand you (and Volte) are saying I make "non-native" mistakes....So the
problem is I don't make native mistakes...So I am non-native guilty of doing non-
native mistakes....

Your syllogism is:

1-Slucido claim:

"If you have input and output, the most important factor is INTENSITY and TIME"

2-Slucido make non-native mistakes.

3-Ergo Slucido is wrong.

Please, explain me this logic, because it seems awful.

On the other hand, I am not the only one who claims that. Read this article from FSI.
Maybe you and Volte think they are morons and they make a lot of non-native mistakes.

Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language
teaching

">http://digital.georgetown.edu/gurt/1999/gurt_1999_07.pdf

FSI wrote:

Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor
is there a single “right” syllabus.

“Any intelligent and disinterested observer knows that there are many ways to learn
languages and many ways to teach them, and that some ways work with some students in
some circumstances and fail with others.” This
matches our experience precisely.

It is also clear, as many have reported, that learners’ needs change over time—
sometimes rapidly.

Lesson 4. Time on task and the intensity of the learning experience appear
crucial.

There is no substitute for simply spending time using the language. Segalowitz
and his colleagues have pointed out how crucial to reading ability is the
simple fact of doing a lot of reading (e.g., Favreau and Segalowitz 1982). Our
experience
at FSI indicates unequivocally that the amount of time spent in reading,
listening to, and interacting in the language has a close relationship to the
learner’s ability to use that language professionally.

Well you are blatantly wrong here. Natives do not makes horrendous mistakes. We
usually make mistakes in spelling. Spelling does not count in what we are talking
about. No native, who speaks English, will ever say, 'You need reading'. This is what
I'm talking about. These are non-native mistakes. Don't you understand? Things that
non-natives will *never* SAY, not write. Things that are blatantly outright wrong to
our ears. Things that make us cringe when we hear them. You have a native language so
I'm sure you MUST have heard such things before.
Writing is unnatural and has to be explicitly learned. What we say is what matters. I
assume you are trying to learn a 'standard' English, either a dialect from America or
England. You can't hide behind other 'dialects' to justify your mistakes. There is no
dialect of English anywhere that uses the construction 'You need doing'. Informal
grammar is not wrong, it's just informal.

I hadn't read much what else you guys were talking about but...

1-Slucido claim:

"If you have input and output, the most important factor is INTENSITY and TIME"

Ok, well that's fine.

I imagine what Volte was saying is that your level of English is not as good as it
could be and since you use a certain method (of I/O), that certain method must not be
working well for you. Because if it was working you would speak better English.

But since I think I may have been lead astray from not reading enough of the previous
posts, I will opt out at this point.

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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
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Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

Message 101 of 126

30 November 2008 at 1:20pm | IP Logged

zerothinking wrote:

slucido wrote:

You only need reading this forum or other forums, including this thread.

Writing is unnatural and has to be explicitly learned. What we say is what matters. I
assume you are trying to learn a 'standard' English, either a dialect from America or
England. You can't hide behind other 'dialects' to justify your mistakes. There is no
dialect of English anywhere that uses the construction 'You need doing'.

Well actually, the construction exists, but with a very different meaning from how slucido tries to use it.

"The house needs painting" is a dialectal variation of "the house needs painted" or "the house needs to be painted".
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reineke
Senior Member
United States
https://learnalangua
Joined 6446 days ago
851 posts - 1008 votes

Studies: German

Message 103 of 126

30 November 2008 at 1:44pm | IP Logged

zerothinking wrote:

Well you are blatantly wrong here. Natives do not makes horrendous mistakes. We
usually make mistakes in spelling.

I don't know if that "makes" was on purpose (twice) and my comment does not apply to you. Natives do make bad mistakes - in their own native way. Depending on their education, their writing can be terrible. I am willing to look at sluicido's arguments independently from his English language skills. His logic is weak. He offers some common sense advice which however in no way supports his theory about language methods.
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slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
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4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

Message 104 of 126

30 November 2008 at 3:25pm | IP Logged

This talking about my English is very boring. I am not actively studying any English dialect. I am listening and reading as much as I can from any dialect or country. I think about languages as a mean of communication and I don't mind if I am a fossil, a dinosaur o a trilobites. I don't need any degree right now.

This thread is written in gobbledygook and I am going to summarize up my position:

1-As long as you have input and output the most important factors are intensity and TIME.

2-The best method is the method you don't give up.

3-Find out your favorite method and keep practicing it.

4-Practicing your target language is the most important factor (time and intensity), because the average learner give up.

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