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Text memorization and imitation | ||
Tags: Memory | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5856 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 65 of 95 28 September 2010 at 3:15am | IP Logged | |||||
That is indeed a fabulous resource. It is unfortunate that you, so far, have received only two votes for bringing it to our attention. Come on folks, we need more votes for these kinds of very significant contributions! I just downloaded the most recent episode (24 Sep). The audio is excellent. The transcription is as accurate as you could ever want for such a comprehensive and current news event. This excellent resource points out several important issues: 1. High quality audio/video material of subjects of interest, along with an accurate transcript is an outstanding language learning resource. Now some may well not be overly interested in a legal/political inquiry into the appointment of judges, but that is part of the message here. 2. If this quality of material were available in your target language, for a bunch of the things you are interested in (for example news, science, history, literature, non-fiction, fiction, sports, education, etc.) don't you think it would be a tremendous boost to your L2 progress? Yes, of course. 3. To be fair, it is difficult, time-consuming and very expensive to produce such high quality material with accurate transcripts. But I think the cost effectiveness is very high. 4. Why is this material not more readily available? Cost is one of the main reasons. Quality control is another. There is a lot of audio available for Wikipedia articles, but the difficulty in keeping it sync'ed with the current material, and the relatively low quality of the audio reduces its effectiveness. It is difficult to listen to very much of it. 5. Another reason seems to be that governments and public institutions don't seem to want to compete with language education companies. If they did, public language learning, such as in schools and universities, would probably be a lot better. It's a bit like governments supporting the carcinogenic tobacco industry to save a few jobs at the expense of millions of deaths. If more governments would insist that all public broadcasters provide quality transcripts of major programming like news, documentaries, science programs, etc., then we could all have "Bastarache inquiry" quality audio/video/transcription material for many of our subjects of interest in our L2. 6. Now all this discussion is spiralling away from the topic of this thread, on the value of text memorization and imitation. I firmly believe text memorization is a very effective means of improving an L2, EXCEPT THAT it is so difficult to stick with. You go to sleep. You loose interest. It takes too much effort. It takes too long. However, reading and enjoying quality audio/video/transcription material of things that you are keenly interested in is not a chore at all. It is a pleasure. It is easy. You can do it for hours. If only there were more of it available. And I don't mean sub-titled material. That has problems of synchronisation, inaccuracy, and it is difficult to read and follow. Quality transcripts, on the other hand, facilitate language learning. What you really need is quality, interesting, comprehensible material. And if there is a lot of it available, it can be interesting. It can cover a range of complexity so it can be comprehensible. If the words are not comprehensible, then using a transcript and a dictionary, you can make them comprehensible. 7. Maybe we need to develop an HTLAL manifesto for the availability of quality transcribed audio/video material for news, science, documentaries, etc. and send it to all the public broadcasters we can find. I personally believe that the extensive availability of such material would vastly improve second language learning for everyone. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5420 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 66 of 95 28 September 2010 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am glad that some people appreciate the value of the material like that of the Bastarache Commission. As tommus has said, it would be wonderful to have more material like this in our target languages. I should add that there commercial products available on the Internet that do this.
The nice thing about this particular material, in addition to the no cost, is the fact that it is real spoken language, not something created artificially for teaching purposes. How often can you get to see, hear (and read) the head of the government, a slew of government ministers, high-level party officials, very expensive lawyers and all sorts of government officials talking spontaneously? When I focus of the language spoken, and not on the fascinating political theatre, I'm always struck by a kind of paradox: French, not unlike all languages, is, one the one hand, terribly complicated in terms of all the things that go into speaking it correctly. Yet, on the other hand, the spoken language of this commission is actually quite simple. Everybody is talking about events that took place in basically in a six month period of 2003. The grammar is simple and the vocabulary limited. Speaking styles are different, some people are lying probably, but everybody is claiming to tell the truth. Everybody is using more or less the same words, albeit in different combinations. This kind of material illustrates perfectly the difference between the spoken and written languages. It shows exactly how repetitive and simple the spoken language is. The transcript, of course, does not convey the importance of the phonetic component of speech. This is something we totally neglect here because it is difficult to discuss technically. Grammar and vocabulary, are more tangible and easier to discuss. Just to get back to pedagogical issues, I would like to emphasize the fact that this kind of material goes a long way to dealing with a fundamental problem that plagues so much language learning: how to go from the classroom to the real world? Two weeks ago I met a young woman who told me how embarrassed she felt when she went to Spain after completing a master's in Hispanic studies and couldn't understand the people she met on the train. I assured her that there were probably dialect and slang issues that made things complicated. I also explained to her that most Hispanic studies programs are not at all geared to producing true speakers of the language. I would also like to point out that the concept of memorization and imitation does not have to mean learning to reproduce by heart. In my mind, it is more important to develop an understanding of the functioning of the language structures. It is not about memorizing the material to parrot it. It is more about internalizing the underlying patterns. Certain set phrases can be learned verbatim and incorporated into one's speech. Other things can be seen as instances of certain rules. The real goad is to dissipate the fog of not understanding how the form is able to convey the content. After ten or twenty or more listenings where one understands what is going on linguistically, two very important things happen: 1. You start to understand spoken language much better and you'll have a better idea of how the written language relates to the written language. 2. Patterns you have studied and observed now become available to you for your own usage. You're not parroting phrases that you don't understand. Quite the contrary, it is because your understanding of the language and the repertoire of expressions allow you to spontaneously make meaningful and authentic-sounding phrases. Well, that's the theory. It's not always that simple. And it sure requires a lot of work. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5976 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 67 of 95 29 September 2010 at 7:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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This type of material is available for English:
http://www.c-span.org/special/nmtranscripts.aspx http://www.booknotes.org I haven't watched CSPAN in a while, but I recall the vetting hearings for Supreme Court nominees being pretty intense/entertaining, as are many of the hearings in which one party goes after goes after a special interest of the other party. Mind you, viewing any of the congressional videos, you will be subjecting yourself to the monotony and glib bastardry of the congressional process, and I claim no responsibility for the jaded political outlook you are sure to develop as a result. The book interviews are pretty cool. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5163 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 68 of 95 30 September 2010 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you all for the interesting comments on this forum.
Can I please bring everyone back to discussing language learning and memorization? I feel we need to talk about timed spacing of repetitions as part of the process of learning by memorization. Even those who use “artificial” memory, such as Tony Buzan and Dominic O’Brien have to review the material they have learnt. This is of great practical significance to learning language: How do we find the time to review and not become bored to distraction while doing so? We all have many other things to do in life and, even if we believe we have their talent, the most cursory reading of biographies of people like Heinrich Schliemann shows he devoted a substantial amount of time to learning languages, almost obsessively so, learning various texts like The Vicar of Wakefield by heart 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5420 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 69 of 95 30 September 2010 at 3:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would just like to point out that in the original article it is not very clear exactly what kind of texts were memorized. The author refers to texts in the textbooks for learning English. Perhaps we can safely assume that this material chosen or designed for teaching speaking and writing. I somehow doubt that there was much emphasis on learning entire pages of great English literature. So, I think we should interpret the word text very loosely here.
For those of us who are specifically interested in actually speaking the language, the following quote is very relevant: "According to W, what makes movie watching helpful to one’s English is imitating and memorizing the lines so that he or she can naturally utter these lines. When W was writing her BA thesis, she interviewed by e-mail eight other prizewinners of the national-level speech contests she had attended and asked them what they did to improve their English. In response, they mentioned listening to English songs, reading well-known English speeches aloud, and making friends with native speaker teachers and students. With regard to these various activities, however, the most note-worthy point was that all eight regarded watching English movies and television series as one of the most effective ways of improving their English. They saw themselves as ‘‘super fans’’ or ‘‘filmoholics,’’ but their purpose was not just to enjoy the stories; rather, their goal was to enjoy the language, imitate it and memorize it. They had collected hundreds of VCDs and DVDs, but usually those without Chinese subtitles. For the movies they liked, they ‘‘could watch more than ten times’’; one person said he would even get up and turn on DVDs at midnight to check the lines he could not recall very well. As a result of being such ‘‘filmoholics,’’ they had memorized the lines in many movies, including their intonation patterns. Some of them said that when they speak English, lines from movies often naturally pop out, making others think of their English as natural and fluent (W)." Far from me to want to change the course of this thread. It's just that I don't think that the word text should confine us to material like The Vicar of Wakefield. Heaven's forbid! But of course it depends on your goals. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6665 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 70 of 95 30 September 2010 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
If you know the texts verbatim, you can revise them anywhere. You don't need any device like mp3, notebooks, flashcards...That's the advantage of knowing texts, dialogs or songs by heart. You just start reviewing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5461 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 71 of 95 30 September 2010 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
As one who has used this method, I would have to disagree on this point. It is not like memorization of vocabulary where you want to remember it forever. In fact, for me the process of forgetting is as important as the memorization. After I have memorized a short text (< 10 lines) each day for a week or so, I soon start to forget them and start mixing them up, combining phrases to form new original phrases that one day may be useful. Also, I have found that long after a piece has been forgotten, some phrase or word or grammatical pattern from within it stays with me forever and I begin to use it when speaking. I remember most texts only for a day or two - but for some reason some of them stay with me much longer. Either way, I have no interest in these texts after awhile - they have served their purpose. After memorizing a text, which generally takes no more than 5 to 10 min I make a recording to compare the pronunciation, rhythm and pace to the original. It can sometimes be difficult to say it well in the same time. Edited by microsnout on 30 September 2010 at 8:20pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6665 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 72 of 95 01 October 2010 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think it depends on your goals. If you only want to learn one language to a very high or native level, I agree. If you want to be a polyglot, I think it's useful to learn verbatim a course for every language, maybe Assimil, and to use SRS. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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