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Krashen & some failures for Massive Input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 67 28 October 2014 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've had very similar experiences, and I've written about them in my log. But to summarize my conclusions: 1. Getting lots of input makes grammar much easier to learn. 2. Studying grammar makes details "pop out" of input, making them much easier to acquire. I would expect rapid results in your case: You're building on a deep, intuitive knowledge of German, and you're continuing to get large amounts of input. Note that similar phenomena exist with children: Some French kids struggle with gender at an age when their peers are doing fine. And just like in the US, there are speech therapists who arrive with games like Bon genre, bon nombre, and provide the kids with lots of concrete examples of how things work. I've witnessed a very good speech therapist working, and her resemblance to my DELF B2 tutor was striking. Apparently, there's less difference than you might expect between a good, upper-level tutor and a speech therapist.
As far as I can tell, the amount of correction received by children varies hugely. Even within my own family, we tend to correct one of our kids but not the other. I've also witnessed big differences in "fossilized" errors between different native kids—some 3-year-olds seem to consistently latch on to certain errors for months at a time. Others don't. I'd also expect that you'd see more correction in Quebec, where there's an existing colloquial register that's falling out of fashion. This isn't a necessarily a weakness in natural language acquisition—it's more a case making sure kids acquire a higher-prestige sociolect than they would otherwise. I saw much the same thing growing up in coastal Maine: The vast majority of corrections aimed at school-age kids were intended to stomp out American Vernacular English and the bizarre use of "r" in the Maine accent. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 34 of 67 28 October 2014 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In many cultures the world over, adults don't talk to children until they can hold up
their end of the conversation. This does not seem to affect their acquisition of correct language. I'm strongly suspicious of any theory that assumes that correction plays any important role in children's language acquisition. The whole "learn like a child" mantra is still fundamentally flawed, however, since we are not children and our brains do not work the same way. Children are not small adults and their brains are wired in a different way. A child learns language easier than an adult, and an adult can appreciate an avocado easier than a child. No amount of "eating like an adult" will change the fact that the child cannot integrate sensory information and thus will not like complex flavors. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 67 28 October 2014 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm really curious to learn more about these many cultures where adults don't talk to children until these children can converse. Does this mean that mothers, and even fathers, or caregivers don't talk to their children for the first five years? If the parents don't talk to the children, how do the children learn to speak in the first place? I've always thought that the expression mother tongue came from the fact that most children learn their language from the mother. As for the role of correction in language acquisition in children, I'll be the first to acknowledge that children go through all kinds of learning stages that we must respect as they begin to master the intricacies of a language. But, as can attest anyone who has had children or has worked with children, there is constant correction that is, of course, often subtle and implicit. What do kindergarten or elementary school teachers do? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 36 of 67 28 October 2014 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I would rather think that when the vast majority of adult native speakers naturally use a feature of their language in a certain way, defining that feature as grammatical is not prescriptivist. And learners/non-native speakers are not the same as native speakers. There is a qualitative difference to second language acquisition which is not only due to age, time invested and social environment, but inherent to the adult learner already being fully functional in one or more other languages. Of course adult learners need the same kind of prescriptive rules as native speakers to reach a similar standard of literacy. But my point is that even with massive input, learners will probably benefit from also learning descriptive as well as prescriptive rules, and they might struggle with some features of the language without such rules or other strategies to help them. Edited by Bao on 28 October 2014 at 3:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 37 of 67 28 October 2014 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I call it optimism 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3708 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 38 of 67 28 October 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If I recall correctly, we’re talking about tribal peoples, so the children learn to speak via exposure to and interaction with the rest of the tribe; they’re not gonna spend long periods of time alone with their parents like urban children do. I don’t think whoever invented the expression mother tongue conducted scientific studies to decide what word to use, they were probably just following a hunch. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 39 of 67 29 October 2014 at 6:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have seen the claim about parents not speaking directly to their children in connection with tribes in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania). But somehow those kids must catch a bit of simplified and stereotype language from their surroundings, otherwise I can't see how they can deduce the rules of the language they are supposed to learn.
If you planted a child in front of a babbling TV set and didn't speak directly to it before it could answer in complete sentences, how long would you have to wait? Edited by Iversen on 29 October 2014 at 6:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 40 of 67 29 October 2014 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Children don't learn language from their parents, they learn it from their peers. Children growing up in an area different from the one their parents grew up in seldom acquire the accent of their parents. "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker has some information about this, in the chapter about children, though I'm sure there are books that cover it in more depth. One of the more surprising findings of behavioral psychology has been that what parents do has little to no influence on children's language, behavior or intelligence. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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