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Language Learning and Grit | ||
Tags: Personality | Motivation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 25 of 34 23 November 2014 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In a way, it's a retelling of the story of the tortoise and the hare. In the long run, perseverance (grit) trumps
talent. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 34 23 November 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My favorite example of grit is the "Dan Plan", where Dan McLaughlin—who had never played golf before—decided to invest 10,000 hours into the game as an adult. He's done 5,652 hours so far, and his handicap index is currently 3.1. This is apparently pretty respectable—not professional level, but way above most recreational golfers. Seriously, he's been out there, rain or shine, for years now, swinging away and trying to fix his mistakes.
Fortunately, language learning doesn't require quite that much grit to see really useful and fun results. :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 27 of 34 24 November 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't underestimate grit, I just don't have it - I don't have a lot of passion either -, so I find it rather annoying when people talk about grit as if it was necessary to reach general goals. It may make it easier, sure. But I suspect that a lot of it is core beliefs - for all I can tell most of those studies rely on self-reports and ... let's say, I've heard enough 'successful' people say things about skill, talent and perseverance that are objectively wrong, and disregard the influence chance and the support they get from their social environment have on their own success, that I would want to see a study that takes that into account, instead of relying on self-report of attitudes and self-report of study habits ... Or: "Finally, in a simultaneous ordinal regression model predicting final round, cumulative spelling practice [..] was a significant predictor, but Grit-S [..] and age [..] were not. We followed a similar procedure to show that experience in prior final competitions was also a mediator between grit and final round. Grit-S postdicted participation in prior National Spelling Bee competitions." Previous participation was verifiable. Cumulative hours of practice were based on self-reports. I read that as: "The simple score students had on the grit scale did not predict likeliness of their participation in the final round, while having participated before was a good predictor. Those students that participated in contests before also were likely to score higher on the grit scale, and we want to believe that it's because grit is an innate quality that makes people persevere and become better. Of course, we don't know if it's not the other way around, that people who know they have stayed with a particular activity and improved over time attribute that to their own perseverance, even if they did not have to rely on self-regulation and goal-directed self-motivation thanks to their social environment. We don't know if lack of experience makes people underreport their confidence in their own perseverance and the time they spend practicing, either, but we assume it doesn't." So, is it sheer will-power, or something else? The ability to do something you hate doing because you believe that many years in the future you will be rewarded for it? The belief that you can do everything if you just try hard enough? An attitude that makes successes your own achievement, and failures somebody else's mistake? Being good at enlisting other people's help or creating a social environment in which persevering is easier than giving up? Your ability to utilize short term rewards instead of the long term rewards that are so far in the future they will happen to 'another person'? All of these and more can increase your perseverance, but I don't think everyone can do all of them equally well. I for one am in the process of learning how to seek and build a social environment that supports me and everyone around me. [ETA: Listening to an interview with Lopéz Lomong. That, in my book, is somebody who possesses perseverance.] Edited by Bao on 24 November 2014 at 4:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4661 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 28 of 34 24 November 2014 at 5:19am | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps it's just a sign that things come more naturally for some people, while others have to work harder to reach the same point? I'm sure the same could be said in elite sports: those who succeed weren't necessarily the best ones as teenagers, but they were more persistent than others who were more naturally gifted. However, most of us would agree that natural ability alone doesn't get you very far, which could explain the weak correlation. Edited by Avid Learner on 24 November 2014 at 5:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 29 of 34 24 November 2014 at 7:55am | IP Logged | |||||
Isn't ... elite sports exactly that area of skill sets that you can't actually reach without a great deal of innate talent, that is, a particular body type that makes elite performance possible in the first place? What definition of "naturally gifted" would you use there ...? The kind of "naturally gifted" that comes with being placed in young athlete's training programs, with practicing hours every day for years, or with having significant experience in similar sports already? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4661 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 30 of 34 25 November 2014 at 5:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I simply mean that someone might take a few hours to learn a totally new skill where others might need a few days. I agree you still need talent in the first place to make it - I had written just that. To use a random example, say you have a population of 1000, and 100 get chosen. Out of those 100, the majority (let's say 80) might be among those top 100 who were the fastest to learn a skill (physical abilities may definitely help there), but the 20 others "natural" might have been surpassed by others with more "grit". Of course, those are less likely to have started at the bottom of the 1000. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 31 of 34 25 November 2014 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am sorry, but if you had written that in a previous comment I didn't relate those two to each other. The question is, how useful is it if you know that elite performance requires both a lot of talent and a lot of perseverance when you look at those who are not elite performers? You would need to have a quantifiable measure of the performances attained by people with low, moderate and high talent paired with low, moderade and high perseverance to make some kind of useful prediction about a person's future performance, and about the options they have to improve their performance (and whether the effort will be worth it or not.) And as I mentioned in another comment, my experience is that average and above average performance can be achieved without grit if the person is in the average or above average talent range. ... and I'm still don't buy into the idea that grit as they can measure it is an innate quality of the person independent of the environment. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4661 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 32 of 34 26 November 2014 at 2:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Ooops, you are right, I thought I had said so at the end of my first post in this topic, but no; however, I was thinking just that as I wrote that sentence.
I would say it's possible to some extent, even if it involves some subjectivity. You might just need some scouters or good coaches along with scientifics in psychology to do it the right, way, however. I won't get into the rest as I don't think it's too closely related with what I was saying. I was simply offering a plausible explanation for the correlation possibly being slightly inverse. It's nothing more than an hypothesis and the reason it makes sense to me - that possibly those for whom it was harder might end up compensating with a little more grit than the others. Edited by Avid Learner on 26 November 2014 at 2:55am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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