|
 |
Results of speaking after comprehension? | ||
Tags: Silent period | Speaking | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6826 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 33 of 47 30 October 2013 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I've started my own site here, which I prefer over a log for motivational reasons. @Iversen Thanks for the TV watching idea. That seems like something that could work for me, as I definitely don't have the inner monologue that you mentioned. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 34 of 47 30 October 2013 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
The reason I mentioned writing a script (a "DIY Michel Thomas lesson", if you like),
was that: In general, I personally am hopeless at keeping self-talk, or thinking to myself going in the TL. I soon dry up. I'm much better at it in my own language. So if I have a "script" to work from, that's something concrete I can stick to. Of course it helps if you already have the "lesson" prepared for you, by Michel Thomas or an equivalent sort of course. But if you don't have access to that (or if you get beyond it, or for whatever reason choose not to do that sort of course), then you can do something similar yourself, which has pros and cons. Con: You don't have a native language speaker (or expert) to model yourself on And partly for that reason, it's less easy to spot your mistakes Pro: It's much more flexible. You can make what you want of it. By writing it all down in English first, you can just give rein to your imagination to create the situations you are talking about, bearing in mind the difficulty of the vocab and the grammar of the structures used. Given that you won't have a model to work from, you may need to do some dictionary or grammar book work first, before you try this, which also has pros and cons I think. Now, another potential "con" is that you are switching continually between native and target language. Yes, I admit that is a potential problem. I think in the early days, it's much less of a problem, since in general when starting, we just don't have anough TL to work with. I suppose what I would say to this is that the moment when you think your native language is "getting in the way", then that is the time to start dispensing with it, and hopefully, you could successfully spontanously self-talk and think to yourself without drying up. If you do enough TL listening and reading, Iversen and others have described the feeling of your head just buzzing with the language, and I myself have exerienced this. The problem in my case is that it does not automatically convert itself to output, and this is (usually) because I've not spent enough time (putting it a bit crudely) "getting my mouth in gear". Or to put it another way, the more passive activities I do (listening and reading), the more I get used to being passive. This is why I cannot fully subscribe to the "massive input" theory, tempting though it is. Anyway, I wish you lots of luck. I'm a big fan of experiments as well, although it seems we have done our best to change your experimental conditions(!) :-) Thanks for the blog link, and I'll read it with interest. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 35 of 47 30 October 2013 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
Just had a look at your log. You seem to be well under way.
Would you care to say something about the "Frequency List Mass Sentence method"? Is that in any way related to the AJATT / Antimoon "10,000 sentences" idea? On the Duolingo "silly sentences": I've not looked at Duolingo, but from other things I've done, I'd imagine that the idea is that it forces you to pull out a word from your almost active vocabulary that you weren't expecting to use in this context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| AML Senior Member United States Joined 6826 days ago 323 posts - 426 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, German, Spanish | Message 36 of 47 30 October 2013 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Yes, I'm a month in. The reason I started this thread in the first place was because I found myself asking this experimental question very early on (first week). So, thanks to everyone's useful responses, I'll probably change the nature of my studies into an experiment where I entirely avoid conversation until basic fluency in reading/listening and then see how long it takes me to bring my conversing up to the same level. I describe 'Frequency List Mass Sentence Method' here. It's an idea that I adapted from Glossika. I like aspects of his Mass Sentence method, so I combined it with a frequency list. This way, I get a massive number of example sentences containing the most common words. I posted my list on the linked page. Re: Duolingo. Overall, I definitely like it as a raw beginner, though I'd say it's pretty much useless for people at B1 or beyond. Any criticisms I have of it are rather minor. I'm almost half way finished with it, and I like how it makes you go from L1>L2 and also L2>L1. And it's *free*, which is great for a product that will likely get me to ~A2. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| coin2213 Newbie Burkina Faso Joined 5450 days ago 5 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 37 of 47 01 November 2013 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
Hello, everyone
I just would like to add a few cents to this discussion by quoting a few researchers of language learning regarding listening before speaking which we all did for our first language. Forgive me for the extensive quotes (although cut short), but I feel that they are very interesting and enlightening. "...it has been pointed out that the illiterate often seem to succeed where the educated fail; that other things being equal, the scholar will be handicapped by his developed intellect and the peasant will profit by his ignorance and unformed mental capacities. A family of French people takes up its residence in England. A year later the younger children may be speaking to each other in idiomatic and fluent English ; the older children also speak, but less in conformity with English habits of thought and articulation ; the parents, if they speak at all, produce the usual French variety of broken English. In view of the vast amount of cumulative evidence tending to prove this thesis, the compilers of methods appear to be justified in their efforts to organize programmes of study in accordance with it. One factor, however, seems to have been overlooked, a factor which in the opinion of the writer is the most essential of all, and the neglect of which constitutes an omission of the most serious kind. It is the undoubted fact that the active use of speech under natural conditions is invariably preceded by a period during which a certain proficiency is attained in its passive aspect. The faculty of recognizing and of understanding the units of speech is probably always developed by the child long before he ever reproduces them in order to make himself understood. From a most illuminating work by M. Jules Ronjat, entitled Le Developpement du Langage Observe chez un Enfant Bilingue, we may note the following passage: Preverbal children show evidence of a kind of storing up and incubation of language. They assimilate vocabulary and pronunciation so that from the very first day they can speak they have a vocabulary of twenty, thirty or forty words. A French girl had an Italian nanny who spoke French with a strong Italian accent. One month after the dparture of the nanny, the child begin to speak French with vocabulary of her parents and with the accent of her nanny, the person with whom she had the closest contact during the first year of her life.... During this incubation period it would seem that a vast number of units are "cognized" in all their aspects: sounds, combinations, and successions of sounds, metamorphism, and the semantic values represented by all of these. We suggest that success in the production on a wholesale scale of linguistic matter (either in its spoken or in its written form) can only be attained as the result of the previous inculcation of such matter by way of passive impressions received repeatedly over a period the length of which has been adequate to ensure its gradual and effective assimilation. ...We would suggest that one of the essential principles of all methods designed on the "natural" basis should be never to encourage nor expect the active production of any linguistic material until the pupil has had many opportunities of cognizing it passively. If this principle is valid, then most of the teaching of the present day violates a natural law!" "The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages" (1917) pgs. 75-77 by Harold Palmer Link to books: The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages Le développement du langage observé chez un enfant bilingue (1913) "Perhaps there is no place in the world where so many people speak more than one language than in Africa... In learning various African languages, these people have never enjoyed the presumed benefits of printed grammars, a study of phonetics, or instruction in how to learn other languages, but they master diverse tongues with apparent ease. I have personally inquired of a number of African polyglots just how they learned the languages of neighboring tribes. Almost without exception the story was the same: they went to live in a neighboring village, or in some plantation, or in the mines they were working with people who spoke another language. But instead of trying hard to learn another language, they just seem to take it for granted that after listening to the language long enough, they would find they could "hear" it. 'We just live there and listen, and listen, and before we know can hear what they say. Then we can "talk," one African explained. This does not mean that he is expected to understand (i.e. "hear") everything in the language brfore he said anything, but his whole attitude was one of passive absorption, confident that his ears and brain would take in the language and that, without particular worry or concern on his part, he would be able to understand and speak sooner than even he imagined. This African way of language learning is ultimately the best way of acquiring a foreign tongue, for it is the natural way - the way children learn.... From "Learning a Foreign Language" 3rd. ed. (1957) pg. 27 by Eugene Nida "It is a well documented fact that comprehension precedes speaking in the young child....We regard this sequence of development--comprehensive first, production second, --a functional property of the human brain, which should not be violated in language instruction. Therefore, we take the point of view that foreign language instruction should discourage speaking until a high degree of comprehension is achieved, that is until the student can understand a non-technical conversation and decode it with ease." From "Listening Fluency Before Speaking: An Alternative Paradigm" (1977) by James Nord Link to article: Listening Fluency Before Speaking: An Alternative Paradigm "Effects of Delay in Oral Practice at the Beginning of Second Language Learning" (1970) by Valerian A. Postovsky (former instructor at the Defense Language Institute) Link to dissertation: Effects of Delay in Oral Practice at the Beginning of Second Language Learning Here is an interesting video regarding language development by BBC called "Why Do We Talk": Why Do We Talk? Edited by coin2213 on 04 November 2013 at 4:10am 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6051 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 38 of 47 02 November 2013 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
|
This is a very interesting thread. Thanks for the research links above.
I don't know about the "African Way" claim, since it would seem that these people are being exposed to very closely related languges. That is, if you would throw an American in Japan or any other place with a very different language, I doubt that he would just start to pick it up and produce language. I have noticed though that Africans in China seem to speak better Chinese on average then everyone else besides south east Asians. It seems that a consensus of sorts has developed among experienced language learners here and elsewhere; massive imput via sentences, possibly with SRS (aka "the sentence method"/10000 sentences/AJATT/antimoon, etc.) and in combination with other media. I myself have built on this method and it is now the main method I use (I have also farmed sentences from a frequency handbook like the previous poster mentioned). I'm really eager to read some research about the validity of this method, which has, and variations of it, seemed to have become the method the majority of experienced language learners use. On a related note, in regards to input/listening and delayed output, I was recently in the Philippines and was struck by the authenticity of the English used there. In the country, not many people can speak fluent English, but when they speak, their English is authentic and pretty "native". One person said "what's up?" on the street, a perfectly native thing to do in America. This would never happen in China no matter how many years the person had been trained in English. I can only assume it is because of the massive unfiltered and unsubbed input coming from America into the Philippines. I would imagine that the commonality among countries who seem to have very native like English is the amount of unfiltered native material going into that country. So even if the average Filipino can't speak that much English, due to his/her great input and listening ability, when he/she does speak, its going to be of a much higher quality than most other places. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 39 of 47 02 November 2013 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Hey, he just said Assimil. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 40 of 47 02 November 2013 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
You have a very interesting and thought provoking post and set of quotes. I mostly agree with the ideas. I'll just note here a few alternate perspectives.
There is so much variation in people's experience that this seems to be a stretch. Bill Gates quite college and became a billionaire, but most who quit college don't. With speaking, in the US, I'm aware of plenty of uneducated immigrants who haven't picked up English. I also know several college graduates who came from Columbia, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, etc that have.
That is where I believe the meat of the truth here is.
And this I believe helps us with our methods.
In support of this idea, my wife and I met a taxi driver named "T" during a visit to Turks and Caicos who spoke the 4 languages that he had been exposed to his whole life on the islands. Those languages were English, Spanish, French, and the indigenous language of the island. He grew up on the island and always lived there. He didn't seem like a scholar, although he had 19 children with 4 different woman, so he certainly got around. The method he used was a lot like the one described in Africa. His more distant ancestors would appear to have been from Africa.
These are the ideas behind my personal approach as well. There are other supportive reasons as well, such as not wanting bad pronunciation to become practiced, feeling more drawn to the well spoken and written words of others rather than circumlocation to get a point accross, etc. Edited by luke on 03 November 2013 at 10:18am 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
