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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4443 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 9 of 47 12 February 2015 at 1:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Part of the problem I'm finding is that the teachers in "publicly funded" schools are paid to do their work whether we can do the most basic tasks like asing for directions in Paris or not. The local school boards in Canada set the curriculum. If a student is enrolled in a private school, the parents would demand much higher standards because of the high cost. The other issue is that a student's daily exposure to a language is limited to no more than 2h/day. Very few of my classmates would go home and watch a French program on TV even when it is available. Even in class, the teacher would explain the meaning of words & phrases in English so we didn't get 2 full hours of exposure. During our 3 months summer break our exposure to French was virtually 0. The fist 5 years of my French studies I was consistently getting high marks doing nothing but subject-verb conjugations. What does a 90% test score in a language program that focus on vocabulary mean? Not a lot. Once I was in Taiwan for a summer exchange and ended up in an advanced level Mandarin class. I'd go shopping bargaining for cheaper prices and dining in all sorts of places on my own. And I'd ask locals for directions and went places by bus. Since I don't live in Taiwan, the only way to get my exposure up was by limiting my English TV & radio programs to the news. For 8 months I'd only watch TV shows from China, Taiwan or Singapore. After that I'd introduce English programs back into the mix. Basically it's a simple problem of numbers. The number of hours you get exposed to a language in class is limited. Not getting sufficient daily exposure isn't just a matter of taking longer to become fluent. If you're going to repeat the same basic phrases in 10 years, you're not getting anywhere. Right now I'm using a set of audio recordings to learn French. In a 1h recording I picked up more than I did in class for 5 years. Before Christmas I took out a music arrangement I wanted to learn on piano. There was an upcoming performance in 2 weeks. Worked at the piece every day. The performance went sufficiently well although the playing wasn't the best. Setting your own goals and deadlines is more important than just going to class. Edited by shk00design on 12 February 2015 at 1:09am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 10 of 47 12 February 2015 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm quite familiar with work of Claude Germain who is a highly respected researcher in the field of
second-language instruction. I believe that once you cut through the jargon and some of what I consider academic mumbo-jumbo, the big difference between core French programs, i.e. a few hours a French a week, and immersion French is that in the latter case, French is the exclusive medium of instruction, at least initially. As has been pointed out, immersion students get 3 to 5 times exposure to French, at a very early age, and for a wide range of topics. That's the fundamental reason for the difference in outcomes. One can add to this fact all sorts of neuroscience considerations that may be interesting and valid, but the essence is in the amount and quality of early exposure to tFrench. Is this a surprise to anybody here? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4948 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 11 of 47 12 February 2015 at 4:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I think it depends on the individual. That's a bit of an out answer, but it's true. However, some thoughts based on my own experiences learning languages since 2010.
Point one about explicit grammar not leading to implicit understanding, true. Just because you know by heart a book on building a ship, doesn't mean you can then go out there and fix up one capable of sailing around the world. Two different skills. Same with grammar (the glue of a language), and output. The latter involves delicate and precise muscle activity, and sequential neural firing to produce cogent output. Learning how something works (be it a boat or grammar), requires neither, it just requires memory and thinking skills. Immersion is obviously a superior system since it discourages the dominant language from always winning the communication tug-of-war. "Use and re-use" is code word for "drill baby drill". Most especially at the beginner level, the fastest way to develop independent usage is to just suck it up and learn, memorize, and repeat core phrases and sentences structures that can then be used as templates to plug in new vocabulary and other elements. I do think however that SOME grammar understanding at this stage does help adult leaners feel more reassured about their utterances. If anything, grammar knowledge should sooth fear and apprehension. It should not be the vessel by which one creates speech in a new language, that is no better than translating. This latter statement covers for the "explicit language rules" in oral communication. To me the keys for quicker language learning are intensive drilling at first, including quick acquisition of core vocabulary. Drilling key patterns plus vocab quicker means getting out of the "language course trap" quicker, and moving on to independent native material that is far more interesting. When a learner reaches the stage where reading on topics they like is actually feasible, the chances of the new language taking root for good skyrocket. After this is accomplished (independent use by reading), listening should be next. Just put on the darn language on the radio, computer, and LISTEN. Yes, even when you understand nothing. You are supposed to understand nothing for the first month: your hearing is getting used to the new language sounds, cadence, syntax, etc. After 30 days it begins to open up (sometimes in as little as two weeks). Once listening is fine-tuned, massive input period should follow, both reading and listening. Speaking in a large scale comes last, and it depends on the person. Some people like waiting a long time, others no time at all. Edited by outcast on 12 February 2015 at 4:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 47 12 February 2015 at 8:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This sounds to me to marry well with the Input Hypothesis. I do think that there is a clear difference between explicit and implicit knowledge (or semantic and procedural memory, perhaps), and that schools focus on explicit knowledge, because that's what's important for subjects like maths and history. But for language, we need to let our brains absorb the language and figure things out by itself, and it's nearly irrelevant whether or not we explicitly know the rules. The knowledge needs to be in our subconscious, not our conscious, minds.
But Krashen would probably not say that drills are good, or that reading should be postponed. This hypothesis seems more output than input oriented. And I think I'm with Krashen on this one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 13 of 47 12 February 2015 at 9:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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As someone who used to work in cognitive science you need be a bit careful about how these terms are used.
Explicit vs Implicit knowledge: Being able to explain something versus doing something without "explicit rules". So if you are apply learnt grammar rules consciously when speaking, that's using explicit knowledge; if you say something because it sounds right, and have no idea of the rule, that's implicit knowledge. Declarative vs Procedural Knowledge: A similar distinction, being able to say something vs being able to do something. Presumably because the part of our brain that contains knowledge of the world is different from the parts of the world that acts (e.g., I can touch-type and don't have declarative knowledge of where the keys are - this is a completely implicit, procedural process). Philosophers make a similar distinction between Knowledge-How and Knowledge-What. However, it's a big and open question how these different parts of the brain interact. For instance, I learnt to touch-type years ago using a free program that would show me where the keys on the computer where. At that point my knowledge of the key position was explicit and declarative. By doing lots of drills it became implicit and procedural. Presumably I somehow shifted my temporary explicit knowledge of key positions into another part of my brain that controls finger movements. Also keep in mind that if I have a word in conscious explicit knowledge, I can type this word, which demonstrates that the two parts of the brain are in good communication. On the other hand when you ask me where a particular letter on the keyboard is, I have to move my hand first to see where it is. So at least in the case of touchtyping, knowledge can flow from the explicit/declarative part of the brain to the implicit/procedural part - BUT not visa versa. On the other hand, there are lots of situations where explicit knowledge won't affect the processing of another part of the brain (e.g., in visual illusions where no amount of explicit knowledge will convince the other part of the brain that the illusion isn't there). In this case it appears the implicit part of the brain dealing with visual processing sends it's information forward into the conscious part of the brain, but explicit information can't be sent back. It's a very interesting (and open) question how/if the (implicit/procedural) parts of the brain that deal with language production deal with the (explicit/declarative) parts of the brain. Edited by patrickwilken on 12 February 2015 at 9:39am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 47 12 February 2015 at 9:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The FSI has done this at times to prevent interference with English sounds. I.E. words that look like English sometimes have different phonemes.
It is interesting. I get your touch typing example, but it seems to me if I were put in a cell with no keyboard, I could take my touch typing skills and eventually re-create an accurate keyboard layout. Similarly, one may form a personal hypothesis about how something is expressed and later revise that based on experience. The simple, common example is how children regularize irregular verbs before they have enough experience to know the irregular forms. Edited by luke on 12 February 2015 at 10:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 15 of 47 12 February 2015 at 10:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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To me it sounds like Krashen dressed up with a couple of fashionable words. I haven't read the original research report, but DaraghM didn't mention anything about brain wawe measurements and without those any reference containing the word "neuro-" is just a buzz word used to impress the public. Beside I find it amusing (bordering on tragic) that the experiment compares pupils in ordinary school classes who get 1000 hours of teaching with pupils in specialized schools who get 3-5000 hours of training, including one-to-one sessions with a teacher. If this is correctly understood then I see no reason to characterize the researchers as 'respected' (although they may be so among people who share their opinions).
My own stance is that it is utterly unlikely that it wouldn't help you to absorb language patterns from input if you knew beforehand what to look and listen for - and it's the role of grammar (and vocabulary) studies to give you precisely that kind of knowledge. You may be unable to get that message across to unwilling and uninterested pupils in ordinary school classes, but chances are that those who are put in special French schools have parents who take the French language more seriously than those who choose other schools, and that attitude would probably be shared by their offspring. That alone could compensate for some aberrant teacher attitudes. I have in a way participated in an experiment of this kind in a mathematical-physical branch class in the Danish 'Gymnasium' (=high school/grammar school)- I had an excellent teacher in French, who for 2½ years tried in all possible ways to teach us damned mathematicians French through the natural method, which implied that he didn't say a word in Danish to any of us during that period, not even outside classes. But then one morning he stupefied us by addressing us in Danish, and his message was that only af few us had any chance of passing the exam - so from now on we would get it the traditional way with a text book, grammar and translations galore. And after ½ year almost everyone passed the exam. After that experience it would be very difficult to convince me that those oldfashioned methods didn't have an effect, but obviously only in conjunction with some genuine input and some training in output. Edited by Iversen on 12 February 2015 at 4:16pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 16 of 47 12 February 2015 at 11:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I totally believe that, but that doesn't mean that you are directly accessing the touch-typing center of the brain. I don't need a keyboard to know where the keys are, I don't even need to move my fingers, what I do is imagine my fingers moving on an imaginary keyboard. From memory, much of the motor program in the brain is unconscious, but the last bit before we move isn't - perhaps that's what I am accessing. What the appropriate analogy with language skills are I don't know.
That was my first thought as well.
There is a lot more to neuroscience than brainwaves, but I agree that people often use neuro-buzzwords to make things more sexy. However, in fairness nowdays neuroscience is so intertwined with psychology, philosophy, computer science, genetics (i.e., cognitive science) that when someone says 'neuroscience' they are generally referring to cognitive science findings, but 'neuro' sounds more scientific so people tend to put a 'neuro' label on things (neuroeconomics, neurolinguists, neuroethology, neuroanthropology etc). If you take procedural/declarative knowledge as an example: this distinction was brought to light by brain surgery patients who lost their hippocampus, but much of the work distinguishing the different systems comes from psychological experiments. And philosophers have done a lot of work explicating what it means to talk about different kinds of knowledge. But of course there are "brain wave" studies of this as well, as well as MEG, EEG, single cell neural recordings, fMRI etc.
Sure, but that's a lot different from explicitly learning all the grammar rules by heart as a way of learning a language. Is explicit knowledge of grammar (i.e., what we learn in textbooks) being used: (1) to show you where better to attend to input; (2) or to directly generate output? I don't think anyone would argue with 1, but there seems to be a lot of heat around the validity of 2. Edited by patrickwilken on 12 February 2015 at 11:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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