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Audiolingualism & Grammar translation | ||
Tags: Translation | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 35 04 December 2011 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Some people do not like to sing or dance. Some people do not like having fun. Or rather, fun for them is memorizing conjugation tables and lists of words. Obviously, @iversen does not like to see children singing and dancing or having fun in the foreign language class. I have a different opinion. I look at the results in terms of language retention and proficiency. I look at test score results. That's what really counts. As I said in my original quote, "Somethings will work, others will not." A couple of years ago I attended a language teaching conference where a young teacher demonstrated an activity he had developed for teaching French grammar to students age 6-12. It was based on the idea of making the children compete in teams to score points by getting the right answers. The whole thing developed into a sort of olympics-style event with classes and schools competing against each other. I remember remarking during the presentation that a) the children really enjoyed learning b) it was highly effective in terms of retention and the ability to use the grammar. @iversen and everybody else here are older than 6-12. This sort of teaching method is not for us. But what do you do with a class of 25 8-year old kids? I know many people here love nothing more than pouring over conjugation tables and rules for disjunctive, subject direct and indirect object pronouns. That's fine. But we have to admit that not all 8-year old children learn the same way. Edited by s_allard on 04 December 2011 at 4:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 26 of 35 04 December 2011 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I wonder how many people here have ever taught a language class to 25 young children. Besides making grand statements to which he is wont, just how exactly does @cainntear propose teaching a foreign language to children? How does he suggest teaching French verbs in the elementary school without using songs, rhymes and games? How can he say that "Singing doesn't teach you much language at all, without a lot of very intensive attention (which undoes the "fun" part)" when all the scientific evidence says the very contrary for working with children? Nobody is against mental stimulation. Nobody is against a "well-taught" and "absorbing" class. Well, just exactly do you do that with 8-year old children? That's the problem here. Many people are quick to criticize so-called fads but have nothing to propose instead. When @cainntear says, "The problem is that once you start defining your goal as "increasing motivation", you risk taking your eye off the core learning content.", I wonder what he is talking about. The goal is language retention and proficiency. How we do this is the issue. For reasons that I can't understand, some people here are against fun in the classroom for young children. I suspect they are against fun period. I am not for or against fun in the classroom. I am for trying and finding whatever method gives the best end results. Period. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 35 04 December 2011 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Using all this authentic material in the classroom is certainly not for everybody, and I'm sure many kids don't enjoy them. The interesting to note is that as adults, especially when in an immersion environment, all those plays, tv and radio programs, movies become interesting. I happen to believe that one of the most effective learning tools is watching soap operas in the foreign language. But this is not for everybody. We have different goals. Some people learn languages as a purely intellectual challenge. Others learn to communicate and interact with speakers of the language. I'm in that camp. That's why I like all these authentic materials. But I also see why other people can detest this and prefer to study words alone. Each to his or her own. Edited by s_allard on 04 December 2011 at 4:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 35 04 December 2011 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Here is an interesting story in the Guardian of Sunday, Dec 4, 2011 about the university professor who has developed a language learning kitchen. The title of the article is: Paul Seedhouse: learning a language is much more fun in the kitchen Professor Paul Seedhouse explains his talking kitchen, a new way to learn languages using motion sensor technology Guardian source The article speaks for itself, but I would like to quote the last paragraph: "What we're trying to do is to see how you can engage people's motivations. The kitchen achieves this in a number of ways: first, we know young people like playing on the Wii, it's fun having this kind of engagement. Second, this type of environment provides learners with lots of choices. In British schools fewer and fewer students are deciding to learn foreign languages. I think we need to start from the idea of what motivates people to learn a foreign language and try and develop a mode of teaching around that. The kitchen certainly aims towards this." I think this is an interesting experiment. I imagine all the party poopers here will complain that learners are having too much fun and can't be learning anything useful. That remains to be seen. Maybe this will work, maybe it won't. That's why we have scientists trying new things. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4895 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 29 of 35 04 December 2011 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I found that article interesting, although I doubt I could afford to have the system installed! There was a comment about motivating in the article. Despite what Cainntear said about motivation being the "current fad", motivation is an essential part of the learning experience. There are no "good learners" and "bad learners", there are motivated students and students who just can't be bothered. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5997 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 30 of 35 04 December 2011 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Better my "grand statements" than your strawman charicatures and personal attacks. Let's just put the boot on the other foot for a moment. Imagine I wanted to make a strawman of your position. I would say:
How would you feel about that? Would you like that approach? No, you wouldn't. Because you've never said you're against learning grammar, you just want grammar to be taught in a different way. So while I might question your ways of teaching, I would never claim that you don't want to teach grammar. So why are you trying to argue that the viewpoint of several of us (not just me!) is some kind of anti-fun manifesto built on endless verb tables? Wouldn't it be better to debate what is actually said?
That's not what I said. My point is that motivation has become the be-all-and-end-all in much of teaching philosophy -- see also Jeffers' statement:
While I'd agree that there are no "good learners" and "bad learners", there's a lot more to it than motivation. I believe that the idea of good vs bad learners and the idea of learning styles stem from two simple and well-known facts:
Some people are good at spotting problems. Some people are good at solving them. The problem is that these are often different people. The people who are good at solving problems should listen to the people that are good at spotting them. Whether I personally am good at spotting problems (or I'm just an old blowhard), your statement is indicative of the problem in today's society: no-one's allowed to spot a problem if they can't identify the solution themselves. But just imagine if the plumber wouldn't deal with your leak until you diagnosed the problem and provided the solution....
Look again at Jeffers's statement. Even if you do not personally identify with his point of view, you have to see that it is one of the prevalent views in modern pedagogy. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5997 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 31 of 35 04 December 2011 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Nope. This is a case of overinterpreting "hard science" into the "soft sciences". "the more you memorize, the easier it becomes to memorize" No-one would deny this (and it would be silly to, given the proven success of habitual mnemonicists in memory championships). The objection to memorisation in teaching is down to the observation that memorisation is a different thing from learning. Remember, as you said yourself, the brain gets better at memorising the more you memorise. But learning is about generalising, so you want to train the brain to generalise rather than to memorise. And how do you train it to generalise? By generalising. What does that mean in practical terms? When I studied French in high school, I was made to memorise the verb tables for various irregular verbs. I did that, and I was able to recall these irregular forms, but I never spotted the patterns. For example: aller: je vais, tu vas, il/elle va, ils/elles vont nous allons, vous allez. past participle: allé I was told to memorise that as an "irregular verb". But the nous and vous forms and the past participle follow the rule -- there was no need to memorise them. Anyway, language is a process of creating sentences, not recalling them. With perhaps two or three exceptions, each of the sentences I've written in this post unique -- I've never written them before. As you say, the brain learns by doing, so practising memorisation would never get me to the point of writing a post like this in any language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 32 of 35 05 December 2011 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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As happens so often here, I don't understand this fuss about memorization vs learning. Call it what you want, in foreign language learning there is much sheer memorization. Sure, there are lots of rules that allow to generalize and construct totally unique sentences every time, but the plain truth is that you have to learn by heart, i.e. memorize a ton of material. Now, memorization does not have to mean mind-numbing rote repetition of conjugation tables. There are all kinds of interesting strategies and tools. For example, in French you have to learn to conjugate spontaneously the 100 most common verbs in all the major tenses and moods. I certainly would not recommend that you try to do this by looking at a book of conjugation tables endlessly. There are other more enjoyable and effective ways of doing this. You can call on all sorts of rules that will determine the morphology and the syntax of a language, but you have to memorize the rules. In any case, the goal ultimately is to commit to active memory the thousands of forms that make up the conjugation of all these verbs.
And on another note, I'm firm believer in the value of learning by heart set phrases and entire dialogues in the target language. It's wonderful phonology training. It gives you something to say and, above all, it introduces the grammatical structures. Combine this with grammar analysis and you have a winning combination. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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