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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 57 of 303 02 October 2012 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think a coach or tutor would be ideal to point out weaknesses, but the real changes or improvements will come from the learner himself. So if someone had to go the route of a paid coach or tutor, they should only have to meet them every few weeks for updates or re-evaluation.
I don't think imitating a model is the way to go. Every native is a potential model and the best model is all models: you need to be exposed to a variety of speakers and you should have this variety as your model. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 58 of 303 02 October 2012 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the duration, frequency and specific goals of a program with a coach would have to be worked out between both parties and would be based on an assessment.
As for imitating models, I used the plural form because I also think it's important to be exposed to many samples of speech or writing. On the other hand, I think that for practical purposes one can choose to imitate a specific model for a specific purpose. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 59 of 303 02 October 2012 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
I correct almost everything I write (witness the small "edited by..." at all my messages) and it irritates me that the same thing can't be done when I say something - the only solace is that very few people hear it. There can be no doubt about the usefulness of critique by third parties but criticism isn't a miracle cure. If all the criticism is of the type "don't say X, say Y" then you get an atomized kind of information and it will take forever to accumulate (and remember!) all the isolated rules you learn. It is debatable whether your language in the long run gets better by receiving truckloads of corrections of this kind instead of learning new correct things galore. So the critics should focus on really grave errors, and preferably errors which are recurrent - for instance because they concern very common words or expressions. Some specific problems with accent fall in this category. If you just correct one word with a faulty pronunciation the learner may not discover the general problem so a good language teacher (or accent removal consultant) should point out the general problem - for instance that the learner ALWAYS makes diphtongs out of simple vowels. Okay, take one sound at a time with an ample selection of test items and KILL that diphtong once and for all. This will be better than commenting on it X times spread among other corrections of all kinds. And weeding out errors in a morphological paradigm will be easier if you focus on one form at a time (with many examples in a row) instead of burying the same observation again and again under a heap of other corrections. So can't single stand-alone corrections have beneficial effects? Oh, yes, if the critiquee remembers the criticism. And there it is better to leave out minor issues and focus on a few things that really stick out as inadmissible - the things that make you cringe instead of things that just could be better. This is in fact one special case of learning from extensive activities. If you want to learn expressions from the books you read or podcasts your hear you can't use material that is brimming with new and unknown words. And even if the number of unknown items is small you still need a good reason for paying attention to any specific item so that it sticks in your memory. Specifically about accent reduction I wouldn't expect to get a perfect pronunciation without outside assistance, and even if you live in a place where a certain language is spoken day in and day out you will still have to have to muster an almost childlike curiosity and fascination with the world to remember all the things you hear. And you would need the guts to try out the things you had noticed in practice instead of relying on things you already had learned and tried out. In the long run this might function, but then I look at my own learning situation. I don't have (and don't want) a teacher, and I don't hear most of my languages very often (much less speak them). So the strategy here is to slow things down and scrutinize things in detail. I do this all the time with the written language when I study vocabulary, but due to outside acustic interference (=irritating sounds including neighbours and bad TV programs) I haven't been as diligent in making the corresponding slow analysis of speech sounds. Actually Serpent had to remind me of a technique I developed earlier this year and found to be very efficient, but I needed my computer, a quiet setting and no disturbances to do that exercise. So in a busy period this summer I quietly forgot about it. But now I try to squeeze in those exercises again because they are the second best thing you can do when you don't have a private pedagogical genius at your disposal. The technique basically consisted in listening to a short snippets of speech and writing down exactly what you hear instead of what you had expected to hear. If you want to remove or add a dialectical touch or an accent then you must learn to hear differences that normally are hidden by a phonemic analysis. Phonemes are to speech what letters are to writing: reductive devices that permit you to get quickly from some physical signs to a meaning. But in the process you deliberately cut away precisely the information that defines an accent. So to work on your pronunciation you have diminish your involvement with the meaning. You need to know which words were intended, but that's about it. The rest is learning how to listen to the raw sounds. Edited by Iversen on 02 October 2012 at 4:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 60 of 303 02 October 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When I say critique or criticism, I mean constructive criticism. This basically means looking at how to improve what I am saying or writing. It's not so much "Don't say that, say this." It's more like "How about this?" or "Maybe this will work better" or "This isn't very clear, maybe you could change this around."
With speaking, things will be different of course, but the idea is generally the same: correct egregious mistakes but more importantly see how one can improve. This is particularly important for conversational skills and developing a sense of register. The reason we can't really do this well alone is simply that it's hard to see our own work objectively from a fresh perspective. Why do all publishing houses have correctors and editors? It's because authors need outside help to correct things that they cannot really see. A major danger for learners at an intermediate level is fossilization. You get stuck in a rut. You don't make major mistakes. You can say what you want. But basically you keep repeating your little repertoire of words and constructions over and over again. A good editor or coach shakes you up a bit and forces you to see things differently. Can you do this alone? Can you correct your own pronunciation? Of course, you can. But all authors like to work with a good editor for the same reason actors, singers, athletes and many other performers have coaches. The coach sees things that you don't and can help you go higher. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 61 of 303 02 October 2012 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Have you worked with such a coach?
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 62 of 303 02 October 2012 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not every language is the same.
For fluency in Brazilian Portuguese, you don't have to read a lot, since most Brazilians hate reading and are more into spoken language / soap operas...In the case of Brazilian Portuguese, the knowledge of colloquial expressions and slang is more important...If you focus your learning on written materials, you will sound foreign/bookish/formal... Furthermore, for Brazilian Portuguese, the pronunciation is extremely important. While in Italian and French, there is tolerance when it comes to pronunciation of open and close E's and O's (because of the large intra-dialectal variation)...In Portuguese, if you mispronounce an O or an E...it will be the 1st sign of ''non-nativeness''... And there is also another thing which is important: native-sounding intonation. It is extremely difficult to learn it. you have to acquire it naturally, by living in Brazil. Edited by Medulin on 02 October 2012 at 6:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 63 of 303 02 October 2012 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, but none of this makes much sense. There are segments of the population who don't like to read in every culture and even if there weren't, it still doesn't stop you from only relying on videos... The written and spoken language are always different. Second, I can't imagine in which way mixing up "E's and O's" is such a big deal in BP but not in French, or how BP's intonation is so much more intricate than that of French or Italian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 303 02 October 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am working with one right now for Spanish and I am acting as a coach for an advanced learner of French. I think it's hugely effective. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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