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Revolutionary approach to learning langua | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6172 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 129 28 January 2009 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Speaking of which, I'd like to know what kind of difference the researcher found between passive versus active. I would expect that you'd need to listen actively to get good results, but your brain definitely is aware of things you aren't consciously paying attention to... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6457 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 129 28 January 2009 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've set this all along and I whole-heartedly agree.
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| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5903 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 11 of 129 29 January 2009 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with Volte on this one.
I don't know how he conducted his experiment, but a cursory reading of the article will reveal that his claims are misleading. The first sentence in the following quote raises alarms right away, although its not the Dr who said that himself.
The flaw in this article is that it can lead you to think that JUST "listening to the language" (which is the same as "exposure to its sound patterns") frequently even if you don't understand it, wherever you are, is THE BEST way to learn another language. But he contradicted it later by saying that those doing immersion have advantages over others. If this is the case, then immersion is a BETTER way to learn the language compared with the method of "just listening". With this, the article's claim loses credibility and verges on sensationalism. Or maybe he is just being portrayed as a pioneer, in the forefront of research ("ground-breaking"), by stretching the apparent scope (consequently, significance) of his findings? There is a difference between immersion and "just listening". If you don't understand any word of the language your listening to, your not going to make any progress at all however long you listen and however motivated you are, even if you can accurately make out the sounds of the languages. In my case, I actually losses patience and tune out. Learning a language starts from knowing the meaning of a word - the first word you've understood, and the 2nd, 3rd, the rest of the pieces will fall into place. Increasing knowledge of word meanings actually is my great motivator to listen more . Speaking/listening is just one way of transmitting language, writing/reading another. There are a number of undeciphered written languages, and only through another known language can we crack their meaning, thus learn them. The same apply with spoken language. Not because we've heard them frequently (just pure hearing) can we crack their meaning. These make his conclusions about listening as "the best way to learn languages" as incorrect. He should have restricted his claims to the role of listening as "a critical component of the best way to learn languages", assuming he favors immersion, which is an aural input with the benefits of all kinds of cues from the senses providing the meaning. I am not a scientist so I am just saying here my impression of the article, that he failed to highlight the role of listening in helping identify correctly the individual native sounds (phonemes), which in turn helps identify (or memorize) words whose meanings we already know or meanings we can extrapolate in contexts that we already know. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 29 January 2009 at 2:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6172 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 129 29 January 2009 at 2:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I can't believe you wrote all of that crap.^ Yes, the first sentence in the article (ie. not written by the researchers) is misleading. If you actually read the article, however, it's clear that the actual researcher has only concluded that listening is critical.
Jesus...talk about missing the forest for a single tree. Edited by chelovek on 29 January 2009 at 2:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5903 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 13 of 129 29 January 2009 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Unless that is meant to be self-referential and a description of yourself, could you please explain further to which "all" the "crap" refers to?
If you actually read my comment, I was faulting not just the researcher (for omissions) but moreso the article writer.
When the forest is ok apart from a single tree, do you still discuss the other individual trees? Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 29 January 2009 at 4:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6096 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 129 29 January 2009 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
First up, the article was written by the university the guy did his PhD at -- though not a prime source, it is far closer to it than the usual junk science in the mainstream press. Secondly, Sulzberger makes some pretty astonishing claims: "To learn a language you have to grow the appropriate brain tissue"; "Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language—which is how babies learn their first language." Now I'm no neuroscientist, but even I know that current academic thought is that the adult brain doesn't "grow", it merely reconfigures the existing tissues. A child's brain grows new connections, an adult brain learns by altering the strength of fixed connections and doing some funky stuff with dendrites (that they're only just discovering now). That he can claim a model that is so out-of-step with mainstream neuroscience casts doubt on his academic credibility. And as for "clear that the actual researcher has only concluded that listening is critical", while he does indeed use the word critical, he did also say that "One hour a day of studying French text in a classroom is not enough—but an extra hour listening to it on the iPod would make a huge difference," which is about as unclear as it gets. We have the apparent fixed variable of time spent (1 hour) and no explicit notion of splitting that time between activities -- he appears to advocate a 100% switch from classroom study to listening. If the message is confused, it's the messenger's fault, not the listener's. Don't blame the kiwi (no chance I'm writing out that username!) Now, addressing several points from the article: Is this exposure critical? Did I get this exposure? I don't know. Most of my exposure to incomprehensible Gaelic and Spanish was while I watched TV/films with subtitles. Studies into interactions and interference of sensory input to the brain suggest that the act of reading the subtitles actually dulls auditory perception as it filters out the "noise" that distracts the reading process (and because reading activates the "hearing" parts of the brain). So I was certainly in an environment with a lot of native sound, but there is academic disagreement as to whether I ever really heard any of it or not. "Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words." This is an extreme standpoint. I certainly certainly believe it is true that: Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how familiar we are with the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words. To make the leap between the two statements, his study must prove that listening to untuned input is more effective than a phonetically structured instructional course, but given the sore underrepresentation of phonetics in modern teaching, I find it unlikely that he did so. What do I mean by this? I mean that most courses let the content be dictated by a grammatical ordering or particular subject based language. New sounds appear as and when this ordering demands. This means a new phoneme can be included in one word and one word only for half-a-dozen lessons, and new words are also learned with other new sounds before that first phoneme is encountered in another word. It may well be that this is the crucial defficiency in most materials: the lack of distinct examples prevents the formation of a meaningful, independent neural representation of the new phoneme. Of course, without seeing his paper (rather than the university's self-congratulatory puff-piece) I can't say for sure that he hasn't explored this -- but it is extremely unlikely that he has.... Anyway -- this is just a PhD thesis, not the work of some top prof.... Edited by Cainntear on 29 January 2009 at 7:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6524 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 129 29 January 2009 at 7:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with almost every point you made, except this one. You've described what the view was quite some years ago. At this point, there's firm evidence for neural growth in adult humans. Adult brains are much more plastic than was believed until fairly recently. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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