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My Language Learning Theory | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| allen Newbie United States Joined 5019 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 1 of 7 19 December 2011 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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My Theory of Language Learning
I wrote something like this once before but I don't think it was very good, since at the time I didn't have the experience I do now. Hopefully this one will be more coherent. I'm not a trained linguist or nor do I do much research outside of HTLAL. But hopefully what I write can help someone, or spark some discussion or some critism. So, first I thought about how languages work. It starts with two people. The first person wants to communicate something and the second person wants to receive that message. How does language allow this to happen? Here's the simple model that I thought up. It works as a process of conversion. Basically the speaker has some ideas or feelings and converts those into words and sentences. Those sentences are converted into a spoken or written medium. Now the second person will convert that back to into words and sentences and then finally back into ideas and feelings by which point we would say that they comprehended the message. So something like... Ideas -> words -> writing/speech -> words -> ideas A native speaker can complete this process quickly and accurately. But as language learners, all problems come from not properly being able to complete one of these steps (or not being able to do so fast enough). So sometimes on these boards the problem of listening comprehension comes up. By using this model we know that a problem in listening comprehension has to come from... 1. the conversion of sound to words - whether or not you heard correctly 2. the conversion of words to ideas (ie comprehension) - whether or not you could understand the thing you heard 3. processing speed - whether not you were able to carry out previous two steps fast enough Whether it's reading, writing, speaking, or listening they will all have these three kinds of problems: 1. a problem of the medium (whether it's spoken or written) 2. a problem from the content 3. a problem of processing speed Note that the processing of content is an independent step from the processing media. When you work on comprehending content it is the same process whether you are listening or reading. When you work on producing content it is the same process whether you are writing or speaking. This explains why writing can help you speak and reading can help you listen, but it cannot help you with the particular problems of that medium. Another distinction is that problems of content are problems of knowledge, they are learned, whereas problems of medium are problems of skill, which are practiced. Producing and comprehending content are both therefore dependent on input. So I do believe that you can learn a language to a very high degree without ever practicing speaking. The problem comes on the medium end. I don't believe you can improve something like say, your pronunciation, or the fluidity of your speech, without ever speaking. To me this explains a lot about input theory and the limitations of a high input approach. From here I would start to think about coming up with methods to identify which one of these problems is holding back my progress, and then to start think about about methods to address those problems. Which has led me to a lot of interesting topics like how can we improve processing speed, or why is comprehending content insufficient for producing content. I think that thinking in this way leads to a more flexible approach to language learning, that you can have many methods that can address a problem to suit different preferences and goals. I hope that this post will be useful for the people who've read it in helping them to come up with their own methods. Edited by allen on 19 December 2011 at 5:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 7 19 December 2011 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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The brain isn't as segmented as that. There are interconnections and feedback between processes that mean you can't quite draw a linear pipeline like that.
Language is a very complex process, and it encodes a lot of redundancy. We hear words not simply through perceiving a series of sounds, but also due to context in the sentence. Eg Bye, by, buy. These are three words that we cannot distinguish in isolation. Also Thai, tie (clothing), tie (verb). But yet we do not consider them one word. So we cannot process words independently of, and before processing of, the sentence-level meaning. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4844 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3 of 7 19 December 2011 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I was going to say something similar to Cainntear about words. A lot of people think language breaks down to the word level, and that is why they think if they learn a lot of vocabulary and memorize the verb ending rules they have learnt the language. But according to discourse analysis, the basic unit of language is the sentence (or perhaps the phrase). Words mean nothing apart from their context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 7 19 December 2011 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | ||
I disagree with that view of things, though. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 7 19 December 2011 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
I disagree with that view, though. A house is built of walls, and walls are built of bricks and mortar, but a house not merely a pile of bricks and mortar -- you have to combine the bricks and mortar in a structured way. But that doesn't mean that the house is the basic unit of house building. The basic units of building are the bricks and mortar, and they become more than simple elements through the process of construction, and it's no coincidence that we talk about "constructions" in language too. A word element has its own meaning. But add two word elements to make a new word and it means more than simply the two elements. Add two words and they mean more again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| allen Newbie United States Joined 5019 days ago 23 posts - 73 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Thai | Message 6 of 7 20 December 2011 at 4:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi, thanks for the comments. I tried to keep my post simple so I just used the word
"word" but I didn't mean to make a distinction between words and sentences, and I don't believe that language can be learned at the word level. I don't mean to say that this process occurs to completion after every single word. I mean to say that we can only understand the meaning of words, phrases, sentences whatever after we've determine what those word, phrases, sentences are from it's written or spoken form. Precisely at what level we determine what something means, I can't confidently say. I'm not sure what goes on in our heads between the time we hear the word "tie" and the time when we have enough information to determine what it means. I'm sorry to say the model isn't really that robust, and I just put it all in one step. But I still hope that that doesn't prevent it from being useful. So if your ear can't distinguish the word "tie" from "bye" then I think that may be a problem, and one that you can work at fixing. And I think that is something that you can think of as being isolate from whatever we do to determine meaning. Unless you mean to say that we can only hear the distinction between "tie" and "bye" once we have determined the meaning of that word. Edited by allen on 20 December 2011 at 4:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 7 20 December 2011 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||
No, they were separate examples. But if we consider the pair tie (or Thai) vs die (or dye), or the pair buy (or bye or by) vs pie, you have a simple sound distinction that speakers of certain languages don't recognise (voiced vs unvoiced consonants). But people can still function in English without making this distinction because there's enough redundant information in the sentence to tell you which it is. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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