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Revolutionary approach to learning langua | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6912 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 97 of 129 13 February 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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No offense, but the more of your posts I read, the less I understand.
Am I too bad at making (your) input understandable, or are you too bad at making output understandable? Whose fault is it? I'm confused. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juan M. Senior Member Colombia Joined 5902 days ago 460 posts - 597 votes | Message 98 of 129 13 February 2009 at 11:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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You won't learn a language by simply listening to it, but listening a language frequently will greatly enhance your learning if and when you're actually studying it. That's why I feel listening to radio and watching TV in your target language is so important, even if at the moment you don't understand much of it. It will reinforce what you already know, and ease what you have yet to learn.
Language can be like a very intricate and long piece of music. With repeated listens its structure and meaning become clearer and more fluent. Edited by JuanM on 13 February 2009 at 11:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 99 of 129 13 February 2009 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm afraid Krashen rarely presents a cohesive enough case to be disproven. If you read his papers closely, you'll find notable leaps in logic over multiple variables on the basis of one. Krashen is a reductionist, whereas most serious learners and teachers view language learning as a far more holistic process. Reductionism is useful at an academic level, as it allows us to compare the individual effects of certain items, but at a practical level it means discarding a large body of work, study, evidence and experience. A holistic practitioner can benefit from Krashen's work, study, evidence and experience, but combine that with the work, study, evidence and experience of many other successful teachers whose teaching methods are at first glance diametrically opposite to Krashen's. First up: Universal Order of Acquisition. Krashen claims that however the language is presented, the learner will pick up the individual components of language in a fixed order. This can be disproven trivially: if you fail to present one language point (for example the negative question form) the student will still continue to learn other language points. But there is a grain of truth in this theory, and it is perhaps more about cognitive load than anything. If you present too many language points simultaneously, the learner will either fail to learn or will learn selectively. In high school French I was top of the class, throwing answers out quickly, while others stumbled and stuttered. But I didn't have a full command of the verbs, and these same stutterers could beat me on the draw when it came to "we" and "they". Given the choice, my brain started with the easy wins -- the shorter words of more immediate relevance. The harder stuff it caught up with as I revised. The monitor hypothesis and the distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" is pretty useful, but again we've got to take it out of context, and I disagree with his terminology. I refer to what he calls "acquisition" as "learning" or "internalising" and what he calls "learning" as "memorisation". I could beat my classmates at conjugating -er verbs in the singular because I'd learned/internalised the language, while they had instead memorised the verb table and could "look it up" in their heads. Looking it up takes longer than simply recalling something you know. But I feel that it was monitoring myself that allowed me to teach myself. My monitoring acted as a sort of scaffolding to developing my spontaneous production, and that skill has been transferrable between languages. I suggest, then, that the links between the sections of my brain involved in Krashen's "learning" and "acquiring" are getting better linked with time, and that this assists me in learning further languages. And if we accept that learning can transfer into acquisition, then it puts an entirely different slant on [i+1]: If my conscious (learned) production is one step ahead of my spontaneous (acquired) production, I can learn from it. Funnily enough, this is what happens with the Michel Thomas courses. When I'm trying to create a complicated sentence as per Thomas's prompts. I use my monitor to consciously produce the full sentence, but while I'm still thinking it through, the simple bit pops out subconsciously. What it feels like to me is that stuff is indeed passing from "learned" to "acquired", which is something Krashen doesn't seem to believe happens. ---- Slucido, I'm not going to discuss the shape of clouds or the length of a piece of string with you. If you present a semi-coherent idea (as you did with Krashen) I will discuss it (as I did with Krashen). But right now you are saying that "people learn languages by learning languages" and saying that this is good. You really aren't presenting a debatable standpoint. 1 person has 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 100 of 129 13 February 2009 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't understand what you don't understand...Be careful, confusion is an hypnotic technique that some people use to by-pass the critical factor... 1 person has 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 101 of 129 13 February 2009 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
What I am saying it pretty obvious. People learn languages by interaction with the languages. Interaction means: input+ output = making this input and output understandable by any means. Do you want scientific explanations about mechanisms? I am very sorry, but we don't have this. We are necessarily discussing the shape of clouds. All those SLA theories have a low scientific background. Scientific explanations are about the neurological bases of this processes and how these neurological systems interact with the environment: other neurological systems. It's about physics, chemistry, biology and maths. We are very far from there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6001 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 102 of 129 14 February 2009 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I was about to say you really need to pay more attention to the difference between LEARNING and ACQUISITION, but then I looked a few more sentences down and realized you did mention the difference! So... I recommend applying it to this argument as well. You have not constructed a trivial means of disproving his point: to do so you must show that you have ACQUIRED the further grammar points and not LEARNED them, and on top of that prove that it wasn't your MONITOR injecting the structure. Also I would strongly oppose interpreting him so literally as to say that there are not grammatical points which are not on the same "level" per se. Thus, certain points could be acquired in any order, but (as the way I'm interpreting him) they might collectively ALL be necessary to acquire any grammar points a level beyond. This is so trivial to show that I highly doubt Krashen wouldn't have the common sense to have realized it and meant basically what I'm saying. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6001 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 103 of 129 14 February 2009 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||
But this has already been disproved if you've read the literature on Krashen (I believe I first learned of it on the articles at antimoon.com). There was a guy who couldn't speak and was paralyzed, but his whole life his family believed in him and continued to speak to him and tell him things. When finally one day (as an adult) they were able to hook his finger up to type on a computer, he had no problem composing in perfectly fine English spelling+grammar. So at the very least your definition of "interaction" would have to be extremely limited or take this into account by saying it is possible to acquire a language fully with no interaction beyond physical presence. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 104 of 129 14 February 2009 at 5:28am | IP Logged | |||||
I did apply it to this argument. Remember that I use the term "learning" to refer to what Krashen calls "acquisition". What he calls "learning" I call "memorisation". I said as much in my message. Krashen's use of "learning" is a redefinition of the word, my use is it's real meaning -- I am under no obligation to use his bastardised language, but in this instance I'll do so. I will give you a very trivial disproof of Universal Order of Acquisition: dialectisation. Take Spanish: in Peninsular Spanish, there is a distinct between formal and informal plural second person (Ustedes & vosotros). In South America, they have lost that distinction and use only the formal version. Yet the rest of their grammar is still the same -- the lack of "acquisition" of vosotros hasn't blocked the "acquisition" of other grammar points. So where does "vosotros" sit in the Universal Order? Is it the last thing? This seems very unlikely. If the hypothesis was literally true, dialectisation would have to follow the order, but if we look at the differences between one language family, we'll see that the changes are pretty varied. Am I overinterpreting Krashen? No -- Krashen is overstating his point. The real value in the observed order is exactly what Krashen says it's not: it can inform the teacher how better to present material. The difference between my learning (Krashen acquisition) and my classmates memorisation (Krashen learning) was that to me "Je suis" simply was "I am", whereas to the others "je suis" was one entry in a table. To me, "nous sommes" was something I didn't know, whereas to the others it was another entry in the same table. I learned (Krashen acquisition) the forms one-by-one (therefore there was an "order of acquisition" à la Krashen) whereas they memorised (Krashen learning) the whole table without order. Now if the teachers had been following an observed order of acquisition, they wouldn't have presented verb tables on the board, as it can be easily demonstrated that the various persons are "acquired" at different times. Michel Thomas does this. He starts by teaching the persons that I learned (Krashen acquistion) first, and brings in the other persons much later (at around the same time as I picked them up properly in my French class). He is following a pretty natural order of acquisition (I believe in natural orders, not a single universal) and that means that keeps things simple -- there's only one thing to learn/acquire at any one stage; everything else is consolidation, integration and comparison with the previously learned/acquired language.
But then the Krashen's Input Hypothesis has also been disproven, by thousands and thousands of people. I'm talking about the "lost generation" in a minority language area. A dominant language invades the education system, the system of government, even the religion; and the local, indigenous language becomes low status. Parents stop teaching their children the local language as it's of no value. Yet the language is still spoken in the area, and the kids still hear it every day of their lives. However -- they never speak it. I've met a number of people between 30 and 50 who can understand my Gaelic but can only respond in English. Note that I am not saying it's impossible to learn from input, just that Krashen seems to paint it as inevitable, which it demonstrably isn't. Now I'm sure he'd start blaming this on the "affective filter", but that's such a poorly defined idea to start with that I don't think we'd get very far with it. Krashen, as a rule, takes individual observed phenomena and elevates them to universal laws. He dismisses and disregards a lot of similarly insightful observed phenomena simply because "traditional teaching doesn't work". OK, traditional teaching doesn't work well -- I succeeded in high school despite the teaching, not because of it -- but there's stuff in there that was useful and which did build my abilities. Fix the flaws, don't just bin it. If your house had no roof, you couldn't live in it. So would you demolish it an build a new house, or would you put a roof on it? Anyway, have you read the lecture at the link slucido provided? It gives a pretty good overview of the problems with Krashen's theories... Edited by Cainntear on 14 February 2009 at 5:47am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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