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Not Studying Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 49 of 89 18 August 2013 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you tell a professional golf player "How did you take that shot" he'll slice his next
one into the rough due to second-guessing. If your speech doesn't come automatically, then it's not good enough. What you need is automatic recall of the correct principles and the trick is to automatise the right processes. The good news is you can rewire these processes. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5768 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 50 of 89 18 August 2013 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cavesa, your example is interesting for me, as just yesterday I had a conversation about physics class in school, and how many students are able to memorize a law with an experiment and exercises, and then can do the original experiment and the types of exercises they learnt, but cannot transfer their knowledge to use it in novel situations or assignments.
In my language classes I was always envious of those students who could use new grammar points after the example - rule - exercises routine, because I can't do it, at least not with the assignments given. The main problem seems to be that once I've switched to declarative knowledge of grammar I seem unable to switch back to procedural knowledge unless I do something completely different to take my mind off the grammar. And that in turn means that I end up not being able to use grammar points I've already automatized. So, I help myself by getting a lot of exposure, trying to see the patterns and infer the rules by myself but using my visual-spatial imagination to create a kind of blueprint/instruction manual, rather than a verbal rule. Once I have my first draft, I look at the rules and work out where my own blueprint needs to be changed. My verdict is: Do what works for you. And periodically try out new things, and things that haven't worked a long time ago, to figure out what works best for the time being. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 51 of 89 18 August 2013 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Of course you speak slowly and not too naturally at the beginning. But it is a starting point from which you evolve and at which it is most important to get a lot of input and to practice.
I never said you can just learn the rules and speak awesomely. Of course you need a lot of exposure and it takes time etc. But I just believe that learning the rules can save months and years of time. And that the propaganda "foreign language is not about grammar rules, don't learn it, it is boring and not needed" destroyed chances of, at least, tens of thousands people to learn. One of the important facts why learning without the rules, therefore without shortening the learning process thanks to them, so often leads to failure among normal people (not htlalers or similar). You need a lot of input. A LOT. And the usual courses, classes, teachers, students just don't realize how much. So they desperately need the rules to have at least some chance to learn. Without the rules and without the tons of input, it is a lost cause. There tend to be two basic kinds of learners. Those who get from the examples to the general rule and those who go the other way. Bao, I know it may sound unpopular but I think that at least reproducing the things and applying on similar situations is a desirable and great success for most people. Not all of them have the needed intelligence and when you just make them reinvent the wheel, they don't even get the basic knowledge they could/should creatively transfer elsewhere. And as the last few millenia proved, learning declarative physical laws hasn't prevented all people to transfer the knowledge and to continue the scientific progress. I would stay away from the brain part of this discussion. Just throwing around "parts of brain" that either communicate or not isn't going to get us anyhwere as it seems none of us here is a neuroscientist. And saying that division of a skill between the parts is making you worse at it, that is totally wrong in my opinion. I am just studying the CNS anatomy and it is astonishing how many different parts of the brain and how many different areas of the gray matter participate even in the least precise and least important movements. I totally doubt that the declarative grammar being stored elsewhere than the immersion effects is as important factor as you think. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 52 of 89 18 August 2013 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||
I am trained and worked for years as a cognitive neuroscientist, which is why I think like this. While I think the position I am putting forward makes sense from that perspective, I am certainly not trained as an expert on 2nd language acquisition and so there is little point in continuing to argue back-and-forth on this. I think of language acquisition is a skill very similar to learning a sport or music (or perhaps even chess). There is no doubt that when you are learning (say tennis) that declarative rules about how to hold the handle of the racket, how to stand etc are useful to beginners, but ultimately what people have to do is practice enough so they can use motor knowledge that is independent of these "declarative rules". The same holds true for music. And I had thought this was precisely what you were referring to when you talked about repetitive grammar drills. In the case of language knowing the explicit grammar rules are akin to someone telling you how your fingers should be placed on a guitar to play a certain chord. That's the easy part. What you then need to do is sit in your room and play the damn thing for hours and hours and hours. In the same way I think of reading as a way of continually practicing language. If you can point me to any study that actually shows people have grammar plus input learn faster than those who only have input I would be really interested. The studies I have seen - the Fijian Book Flood (pdf file) is the most famous - suggest the opposite, but I have an open mind on this. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 August 2013 at 8:34am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 53 of 89 18 August 2013 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ah, I didn't know, sorry.
Well, I cannot see why we are "arguing". I never said you don't need to practice. And that the difficult part doesn't come after the declarative rules. I just say, following your metaphore, that practicing guitar for a hours and hours without being previously told how to place your fingers is long and in many cases fruitless. Reinventing the wheel costs a lot of time and only few are able to do it, in my opinion. And it is not necessary. I cannot point you to any study, I find most of them bribed or following more the ego of the scientist (or "scientist") than real facts. Some things are just too complicated and subjective to be easily solved out in a paper and most humanities "research" is in my opinion just waste of time and public money. Yes, I know it sounds unpopular but I think exactly this is the reason why there is the HTLAL forum. It is full of people looking for information based on personal experience. If I wanted scientifically explained language learning, I would have paid a lot of money, joined the classes and probably failed. I can only speak of the people I know. Including a class of thirty people who were to learn German without ever being explained the grammar. Not a single one of them was able to put together a simple sentence after two years of classes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 54 of 89 18 August 2013 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can see that the Fijian study is a powerful argument for getting children to read a lot, but it has not much to say about foreign language learning with or without grammar instruction - besides reading is a passive activity where you can get far just by guessing on the basis of the 'meaning' words.
I would also tend to be wary of judging the efficacy of explicit grammar teaching on the basis of school experiences. There are pupils who simply hate grammar, and that feeling alone would spoil any positive effect - and maybe even spread to pupils with a less vitriolic attitude to grammar. Besides I have seen one of the best teachers I ever have had trying to teach a 'Gymnasium' class from the mathematics-physics line French through the natural method (i.e. in pure French with a minimum of grammar). After 2½ years he gave op, and then he succeeded in learning the majority of the class three years worth of French in half a year with a combination of bilingual teaching, lots of grammar, translation AND exposure (nothing goes without exposure!). The only thing I really care about is to know whether a motivated, resonably bright and well prepared learner will learn faster with a combination of exposure and intensive stury, including grammar studies, and I would be surprised to see that such a student would learn more (within a given timeframe) without the grammar component than with it. Luckily I'm not a teacher so I don't have to figure out how you teach language to children who hate gramar, languages, you and the school in general. I doubt that anybody today would advocate pure grammar plus some vocabulary learning and then expect speakers with both active and passive skills to come out of the experiment. Actually you might produce some excellent linguists and maybe even people who can read or rather decode obscure texts. But if you want people with active skills you must of course turn their grammar studies towards things that are really relevant for language production. But textbooks tend either to eliminate grammar or to split it up in unrelated and incomplete fragments, and there is no reason to trust that it becomes more efficient to do it that way. For me personally it is absolutely essentially to know beforehand what there is to learn so that I can put each observation in its rightful place in the total system. Grammar teaching which doesn't give me that is bound to fail - not least because I would lose my confidence in the teacher and/or textbook author. Another important thing is that I want to analyze a topic in grammar to the point where I can visualize it - and then it definitely is possible to draw on my knowledge while I speak. With time the process will of course be automatized and then I can probably speak even faster than I do now (although people who have commented on my speed have generally asked me to slow down rather than speaking even faster). However the point is that visualizations of schemes and patterns function with lightening speed, whereas running sequentially through a series of verbally formulated items takes time (which you don't have). Which means that items which can't be placed into a system at some point must be learned at isolated nuggets, like words or idioms. But there is no reason to teach EVERY part of grammar as isolated nuggets - which is what bad textbooks do. So unless I know how grammar is taught in a certain study I would hesitate to trust the result - not even if it supported my own opinions. And taking care of personal differences in learning style (and teaching skills!) will make it even more complicated to design trustworthy studies. Edited by Iversen on 19 August 2013 at 1:37pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 55 of 89 19 August 2013 at 9:30am | IP Logged | ||
The Fijian study (and similar studies in Sri Lanka, South Africa, Singapore etc) show that children learning English as a Foreign Language who have free reading as part of the curriculum perform better not only on reading comprehension but also in writing and understanding of grammatical structures, than matched controls who have more formal grammatical instruction. Saying reading is a 'passive' activity is a bit disingenuous in this context. It's clear from the data that the children are not only learning and remembering words, but also learning grammatical structures and are improving in terms of written output (speaking is not tested for obvious practical reasons). From the original paper describing the Fijian book flood showing writing examples from students who performed at the modal average for their respective groups (note: the reading group had less formal grammar etc instruction than the control group): The first two are examples from the Book Flood group. 1.One morning when Luke’s mother was washing, and the men were drinking yaqona, Luke was boiling the water. 2. One day, Tomasi’s mother was washing clothes beside the river, Tomasi’s father was drinking yaqona under a shady tree, Tomasi was cooking the food beside their house, and his brother was carrying buckets of water. The next three examples are from the Control group. 3.Is there was the women in the tree. Mothe sitg in the tree there was a looking at hes mother ... 4. One day there boy Seru is making the tea to drinking his morth was the colth... 5. One day morning their were a house any village by the sea ... I agree it's unclear how well teachers in Fiji, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa etc are teaching grammatical structures in school (though I am not sure you can dismiss the efficacy of teaching globally) and I also agree it's unclear how motivated or attentive students are in class (though at least in Singapore/Hong Kong where there is a lot of pressure on doing well in examinations you would think students would be well motivated). What these studies do show is that foreign language learning in all aspects tested (vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, writing etc) is given a big boost by reading. And these students despite having less formal language instruction improve faster than those with more formal instruction but less reading (though the obvious comparison of using no formal instruction has not been tested to my knowledge - and is obviously relevant given the current discussion). How this applies to motivated adult self-learners I think is an open question. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 August 2013 at 10:00am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 56 of 89 19 August 2013 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's something fishy about that Fijian report. As far as I can see from the article the pupils did the experiment after several years with just formal training.
The test schools were deliberately chosen from environments with little external exposure to English, and the test period came after three years with courses conducted exclusively in the local vernacular and based solely on the teaching of formal structures (quote: "The Fiji Book Flood Project occurred in a context in which SL learners were learning English through a program that was going to predispose them to focus on forms. Children tended to believe that SL was learned through learning the structures of the language."). "In the experimental schools, classroom teachers were asked to replace 20-30 minutes of their normal ESL program with either sustained silent reading or shared book reading, whichever the particular school had been selected to do.". In other words: it appears that even after 3 years of 'normal' English classes the pupils had a level illustrated by the worst text samples quoted by PatrickWilken or worse. Or in other words: the normal teaching methods used can't take the pupils to anything higher than an abysmal rock bottom A1. OK, that's sad, but conceivable. And if it is seen as something revolutionary that you dedicate 30 minutes or so daily to individual or collective reading then the assumption must be that NO time for reading was allotted before - except reading whatever the teacher presented on the cupboard. Again: I'm not really surprised - no input, no output. But apparently the experiment then contrasted this kind of teaching with a combination of formal teaching and a limited amount of reading, and for the 'readers' the writing skills suddenly became surprisingly good (maybe too good to be true). However in this thread we discuss grammarless teaching so the combination of reading and formal teaching should have been compared to the results of leaving the pupils with a book and a TV set and dropping the formal component completely - and this wasn't tried so we still don't know a thing about the outcome of grammarless teaching versus teaching with a 'free' reading component plus a more structured formal component. Besides it could be that children who are allowed to read instead of just chorusing grammatical examples like the reading sessions so much that they suddenly start thinking about the things the teacher preaches - well, there could even be a pure placebo effect because they are the 'lucky' ones in the experiment. Their 'unlucky' control comrades just got a tirade about being more attentive during their normal worthless learning sessions, and that must have the same effect as scolding them. And then we get those examples, which are so divergent from group 1 to group 2 that my first reaction is that they can't be representative, or if they are, that the progress of the readers can't be based solely on thirty minuts daily with a book. But even though I am deeply sceptical about this particular experiment I don't doubt that reading and listening are indispensable activities, I just question whether such a limited amount of exposure could produce such miraculous results if it wasn't combined with some kind of formal study of morphological and syntactical patterns. Edited by Iversen on 19 August 2013 at 2:40pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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