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Krashen & some failures for Massive Input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4531 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 57 of 67 30 October 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually I think the data for the Critical Period Hypothesis is a lot more shaky than you may think. Check out this paper from 2003 which assessed the language abilities of 2 million (!) immigrants to the US. While there was a steady decline for language acquisition with age of arrival, there was no evidence of a critical period for language acquisition, and a huge effect caused by level of education. Critical evidence a test of the critical-period hypothesis for second-language acquisition. K Hakuta, E Bialystok, E Wiley - Psychological Science, 2003 You might also want to check out some of these papers/books. I am certainly not an expert on this area, and don't really want to get into a debate about the evidence (experts apparently line up on both sides). I am just pointing out that it's no where near as clear cut in the literature as your statement suggests. No one is suggesting children pickup grammar purely through input anyway, are they? Edited by patrickwilken on 30 October 2014 at 10:34pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 58 of 67 31 October 2014 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I'm (vaguely) aware that the critical period thing is not solid, and I'm certainly not well-informed in these matters. But then a lot of people (including the authors of the first study you link to) seem to assume it's a sharp line, which I might have implied but didn't mean in my comment. It seems much more probable to me that there's a gradient. That you suddenly wake up one day and your brain has changed radically overnight doesn't seem very likely. But I don't think it's very controversial to say that children pick up languages better than adults?
But yeah, it's probably not just input. Output must play a role, but I'm not sure that children's language development hinge on being corrected when they say something ungrammatical. Edited by Ari on 31 October 2014 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4531 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 59 of 67 31 October 2014 at 9:56am | IP Logged | ||
The idea of the Critical Period Hypothesis came out of studies in vision where it was found that there is in fact a critical period for learning certain basic visual properties in the World (e.g., kittens who have their eyes covered over a certain time period - which only lasts a few days/weeks (?) - can never learn to differentiate something as basic as horizontal vs vertical lines. By analogy the Critical Period Hypothesis implies that there is a discontinuity in language learning between the earlier period (where language learning is easy) and all later periods (where language learning is hard/impossible), and that you should be equally bad at learning languages outside this period (i.e., at 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 years old). A gradual decline in the ability to learn languages over the lifespan could simply be a sign of cognitive aging in general, and doesn't suggest a "critical period" where the brain is somehow tuned to learn languages. Keep in mind though that while in general there is a decline, there are lots of people who do better than their age group in physical and mental activities (e.g., there are 70-year-old marathon runners which would leave me for dead), and so a gradual decline is a lot more hopeful for adult language learners than the Critical Period Hypothesis implies. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 60 of 67 31 October 2014 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
I think mindset has a big influence. A friend of mine (aged 52) recently told me he has started learning Spanish. I gave him some ecouragement but almost straight away he said "I'll see how it goes, but you can't learn as well when you get older" So it's almost as if he's talking himself out of it before he even starts. Plenty of footballers learn Spanish from scratch in their 30s so there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't do it in your early 50s. You would be considered to be at the peak of your powers in the business and political worlds at this age. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 61 of 67 31 October 2014 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
Depending on his personality that could also work to his favour. If he believes that he can learn the language, but it might take him longer than other students that means he's less likely to be discouraged by plateaus and give up. For all I know it is true that somebody over 50 learns a bit differently from those in their 20s. Not worse, differently. My mum recently did an exam for the local chamber of commerce. She told me she doesn't learn as easily any more than she used to. And, well, she carried out her self-study schedule and passed the exam in one year, while the regular students get three years of instruction. So, when I asked her how those two fit together she told me she got much better at studying efficiently over the years; at structuring information and telling the important bits of information apart from the noise, at noticing what she needs to review and practice more and at motivating herself to study. (And I do remember how anxious she was beforehand because she feels she lost some of her ability to take in information.) 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 62 of 67 31 October 2014 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't really want to prolong this debate on the so-called Critical Period Hypothesis because we've had it many
times here at HTLAL. Some people believe this period exists, some people don't. But the reason why there is even any debate about the topic is that we all observe that learning a foreign language at an early age generally - -I would even say always--gives better results than at a later age. The most striking result is accent. People with native-like accents and fluency usually acquire these skills through early exposure to the language. We see this all the time with immigrant children. This does not mean of course that adults cannot learn languages; it just means that generally speaking the results are not as good as if one had started at a young age. What is controversial in the scientific debate is the exact role of age. Is age really the issue or is it more the kind of exposure and contact with the other language at different ages? Is it a physiological process or maybe more a sociological process? How does the change of memory capabilities impact on language learning? I don't know the answers to these questions, but what I do observe is that at all ages intensive contact with the language and lots of correction are key to developing good output skills. When I meet great speakers of a foreign language, most of the time I see a combination of the following: 1. Study and/or work in the language. 2. Live where the language is spoken. 3. Have a sentimental relationship with a speaker of the language. 4. Start at an early age. What this means is that for many of us who are not blessed with these success factors, learning a language will be a struggle. Edited by s_allard on 31 October 2014 at 4:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 63 of 67 31 October 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't want a sentimental relationship with a native speaker of a certain language. The
amount of paper handkerchiefs we'd go through would be insane. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4763 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 64 of 67 31 October 2014 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Two points on critical period.
1) I think the critical period hypothesis is pretty strong for accent. It is difficult to find someone who started learning a language as an adult who has absolutely no nonnative accent. These people are common anecdotally, but are very difficult to find in real life. A professor once pointed out that it is possible to find two headed snakes, but that does not mean that the option to have two heads is open to every snake. Just because you can find a few people on earth who have no discernible accent in a second language, it does not mean that this is possible for everyone. Most of us normal mortals will have an accent. I suspect that there also may be a few points of grammar in each language that will be very hard to use exactly like a native. My wife, with absolutely fluent English, who uses it professionally and reads hard literature for pleasure, still fouls up a preposition every now and then. 2) I am a 61 year old language learner. I am not sure that there is any difference between my ability to learn a foreign language now and when I learned my first at 22. I have not progressed as fast so far with Spanish as I did with Samoan, but this is easily explained by time on task. I learned Samoan in an absolute immersion environment, studying 2 or 3 hours a day while speaking and hearing it every other waking minute. I study Spanish an hour a day while surrounded by English and Tagalog the rest of the time. Young people don't worry; if you can learn a language at 20, you will be able to learn one at 70, barring brain damage. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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