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Activating passive skills by immersion | ||
Tags: Activating a Language | Passive | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 9 of 11 08 October 2013 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes and no. For Turkish, Arabic, and Indonesian, I had used regular text books (Living Language & Teach Yourself-type books), with a lot of written drills but not many recordings. Indonesian I hsd been exposed to before, so it's not a pure example. The transition to active skills through immersion was fast, but not automatic. I still had to work at it, and do my drills, and have lots of practice conversations. One trip to Vallarta I thought my Spanish would automatically come back. It didn't. Edited by kanewai on 08 October 2013 at 7:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TehGarnt Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 4855 days ago 33 posts - 63 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 11 08 October 2013 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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So far, although vocabulary seems clearly to transfer fairly easily from passive to
active use, or from written to audio recognition, I don't recall seeing any examples of proficiency in producing fundamentally novel grammatical features - say, SOV word order for English monolinguals - without extensive practice. I may very well have missed statements to the contrary, but I think that the immersion-activation experiences I've heard involve either prior proficiency in closely related languages or prior grammatical practice. The example of using written drills as a precursor to fast acquisition of spoken skills is interesting though. Were they just done as written exercises, or were the answers spoken aloud before writing them down? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5411 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 11 of 11 09 October 2013 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
Just to offer my two cents : Seven years of learning English in high school left me with a good grammatical knowledge of the language but virtually no speaking ability. Then I didn't use English at all for 3/4 years and started reading extensively in English just before my MA (a painful process at first due to a huge lack of vocabulary). During all these years I read a lot in English but never spoke the language. Two years ago, it happened that one of my collegues was a native English speaker and we started speaking in English quite often. Even if it wasn't that easy at the beginning I found that a few weeks were enough to activate the passive vocabulary I had. So, I guess my idea is that immersion may not even be necessary and that extensive reading is a sure (albeit very slow) way to develop the necessary basis to active use of the language. edit : typos Edited by akkadboy on 09 October 2013 at 10:48am 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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