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"Myths" of foreign language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 9 of 72 26 April 2010 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||
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When I first saw the article that Cainntear refers to I made this comment in my log: "I was almost hoppin' with joy when I saw one myth after the other being mercilessly routed by a certain Jan-Arjen Mondria from Groningen. I found confirmation for almost everything I have been preaching about for the last couple of years in this field, and the only problem is that it won't change the way languages are taught 'out there' - the myths are already too engrained in the mind of the language teachers and pupils of today".
The good thing about Mondria is that he basically destroys the implicit foundations of the cult of laziness in modern language teaching. It seems that there is a market for language teaching systems that promise you to learn a new language in a month with 20 easy lessons that involve no hard work at all. These claims are obviously ridiculous, but the idea behind them has spread to once respectable systems like Teach Yourself, which have atomized grammar, cut drastically down on the number of words taught, and instead wasted the empty space on silly games. Even the theory of "natural learning" - which obviously had good intentions - went to far when it lured some language teachers and authors to ban dictionaries and grammars - instead of finding more inventive ways to deal with the immense amount of knowledge that is available from them. Myth 1: “Knowing a relatively small number of words takes you far.” Myth 2: “Word lists are of limited value.” Myth 3: “Presenting words in semantic sets facilitates learning.” Myth 4: “Words should always be learned in context.” Myth 5: “Words whose meanings have been inferred from context are retained better.” Myth 6: “Words learned productively are retained better.” The problem with these myths is that they to many readers will appear totally logical, and some of them are based on actual (but misunderstood) facts. For instance it is true that a limited words take up a disproportional amount of space in genuine texts, and that you can survive for weeks as a tourist on "Bread, please. How much?". But even simple genuine texts will be incomprehensible if you don't also know a lot of much rarer words. So willy-nilly you have to learn them. The two myths about context will also a appear to be reasonable, but not if they cheat you into memorizing whole sentences. Actually the context doesn't have to be a sentence or part of a sentence - it can be a family of related words or an image or a social sitution (in short: a 'cloud' of associations) - which is why even wordlists based on dictionaries are meaningful. And trying to infer the meaning of a word from a context can lead you thoroughly astray and leave you with even less information than even a peek into a mediocre dictionary would do. Reading and listening alot is obviously a good thing, and for specialized terminology and idioms it may the only way, but the belief in the intrinsic value of inferring and guessing and hoping-for-the-best rests at best on shaky foundations. The mission of Mondria seems to be to tell people that the Earth is round even though it seems to be flat. But unfortunately I don't think he can influence modern language (not)teaching much - it is just too contrary to the prevailing Zeitgeist. PS: Cainntear writes: "I used to buy the idea of uncorrectable "fossilised errors" wholeheartedly, but I don't believe in it any more." Good thing, because it has only been true for people who at some point stopped learning. Edited by Iversen on 26 April 2010 at 10:14pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 10 of 72 26 April 2010 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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If my understanding is correct, Antimoon sells a system or product to learn English. My guess is that these myths are to be debunked in order to convince prospective buyers that Antimoon's product will do the best job.
I would think that for most people in this forum these myths are a lot of fluff because they are nothing more than simplistic self-serving statements designed to promote a commercial language learning system. For example, are there really language learners or teachers who believe Myth #7: "Studying pronunciation is not important"? Give me a break. Of course, one has to study pronunciation. The real question is what is the best way to do it. Ah, the devil is in the details. It's the same story with Myth #1 as commented on in the OP. Step up, folks. Why go to a foreign country to learn a language when you can buy my amazing piece of software that will make you fluent in no time flat? Guaranteed to work or your money refunded. Nobody says that just going to a foreign country will guarantee that you will learn a language. But immersion with good teaching and learning techniques is far better and more fun than anything else. I think Iversen's post is far more interesting and raises important theoretical and methodological issues. I won't address all of them. But I would like to look at the question of "Knowing a small number of words takes you far". First of all, I'll state that I am of this belief. But when we speak about a small number of words, we have to distinguish between the word or lexeme and all the myriad usages or meanings of the word in context. I like to speak of lexical units rather than words. What we know is that the most common words in a language have the most associated lexical units. Take two common English verbs: "do' and "get". When a learner asks us: "What do they mean?", we inevitably answer something like: "In what context?" So, a vocabulary of 500 words is really not that limited. It's really something more like 2000 to 3000 lexical units, maybe even more. OK, maybe the figures are not exact but you get the point. For example, a modern French dictionary would have around 65,000 entries and about 250,000 to 300,000 meanings. It's also important to distinguish informal spoken language from formal written language. The former is extremely repetitious while the latter is deliberately more varied for stylistic purposes. The example given in Mondria's paper is a case in point. To read a newspaper article requires a much larger vocabulary than to have an everyday conversation. But the real issue in all this is not whether a small vocabulary is better than a big one. No one suggests knowing lots of words is a bad thing. It's more a question of learning strategy. Do I approach a language by taking the dictionary and starting at page 1 and work my way through to the end or do I target the words that I am most likely to hear and see? I suggest you learn "to eat" before "to ingurgitate" and "to walk" before "to deambulate". The basic question is: what are you trying to learn? If oral fluency is your main goal, then the emphasis must be on mastering the core vocabulary and the contextual grammatical structures in addition to all the techniques of discourse and oral interaction. If, on the other hand, reading and writing are your priorities, then breadth of vocabulary is paramount. Edited by s_allard on 26 April 2010 at 6:46pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| stout Senior Member Ireland Joined 5369 days ago 108 posts - 140 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 11 of 72 26 April 2010 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||
With Myth 1:It's true living in the country of yout target language does not guarantee fluency in the target language,yes it's a very good way of learning your target language,but it's not 100% foolproof,it dose'nt guarantee you fluency in the target language. Myth 3:Sure,of course you make mistakes,that's part and parcel of foreign language learning. Finally with Myth 7:You do need get the pronounciation correct or as near as correct as possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5729 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 12 of 72 26 April 2010 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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If making mistakes can "fossilize" an error in your mind, how does any child become proficient in their native language?
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| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 13 of 72 26 April 2010 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||
As far as I know, the only thing they sell on their site is the "Perfect Pronunciation" software, which is a fairly recent addition. If I recall correctly, that "Myth" FAQ has been there a long time (as some of AJATT's older articles link to that FAQ). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 14 of 72 26 April 2010 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree that very common words generally should be learned before very rare ones - the myth is about believing that those words are all you ever need to learn. But I'm actually not too worried about the order in which people build up their vocabulary. I personally follow the rule that if a word seems to cling to my memory then I shouldn't kick it out just because I think it is rare. But some words are so common that you really can't avoid learning them (for instance personal pronouns, prepositions and many of the irregular verbs), and in other cases simple common sense will tell you whether a word is worth memorizing. I am sceptical about wordlists ordered according to frequency, - it is better to use a good dictionary with examples and morphological indications, whereas frequency lists are notoriously deficient on these points. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6032 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 15 of 72 27 April 2010 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
I agree partially with this myth, in that it's better to learn in context but it is not necessarily the only way to go about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 16 of 72 27 April 2010 at 4:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to take issue with Mondria/Iversen's Myth 4: “Words should always be learned in context." In the original text, Mondria first recognizes the value of learning a word in the context of a sentence or a text in terms of use and retention of meaning. He then goes on to point out two caveats. One is that certain words can be learned without a context. The other is that the learner may retain the word only in that context and not in others. The author then goes on to suggest the value of "decontextualizing" words so that they have generalized value.
I see the author's point. There are some words that one could learn without a context or an example. This is usually because one can relate to a meaning in one's own language. For example, one could learn to count, or to identify colours and various concrete objects this way. I have no objection here. The big problem that I see is in three areas. First, as I have said before, many words have multiple meanings that can be totally unrelated to each other. How can you learn a word without some indication of its meaning? I'm sure we've all had the experience where we see a word in sentence, we write down the word to learn it; then later we go back to the isolated word and ask ourselves what did the word mean. The other area of difficulty with this myth is the question of idioms and collocations. We know that certain word combinations tend to go together. One can be a "firm believer"in something and still like "weak tea". This leads to clichés and also to idiomatic expressions where the meaning of the expression is not the sum of the parts. Just yesterday someone me told me they had "smelled a rat" in a certain situation. Of course there was no smelly rat around and the person didn't actually smell anything. So here we have to learn the word "rat" in the context. In fact, "rat" is quite a good example of a word that goes way beyond just the little animal. The third area where learning in context is very useful is that of syntactic agreement. Probably the number one problem English-speakers have in French is the rules of grammatical gender agreement. If you learn "voiture" and not "la voiture", you're asking for trouble. And even better yet, you should learn "la belle voiture" or "une grande voiture" so that you learn the connection between adjective and noun. The reason so many users mix up the genders is simply that they don't learn the system properly in the first place because they learned words in an isolated fashion. Not being familiar with case-based grammatical systems, I don't know if a similar problem occurs. In sum, I think it's essential to learn a word in context. That said, I could see that for purposes of memorization or at an advanced level the context may not be so important because the learner has a good grasp of the typical contexts. In the same way for example that a native speaker can take a word like "head" and intuitively see all the different uses. Edited by s_allard on 27 April 2010 at 11:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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