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Devise A Pronunciation Experiment | ||
Tags: Scientific Research | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 41 of 49 05 April 2013 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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But if you by "group setting" mean the modern fad of "communicative exercises", in which small groups of students negotiate what a sentence might look and sound like in the target language while the teacher walks around between the tables and listen a little here and a little there, then I totally agree with you, Iversen! I have experienced that kind of pedagogics as a language student, and I can only say I felt humiliated. It's a great waste of time, at least in the early stages of learning. It might be OK later on, when a solid native-like pronunciation has settled firmly after, say, 8 or so weeks of "deliberate practice", let's call it quality repetition, as sketched above. Then the pron is (should be) automatic and the students can focus on other aspects of the new language.
Also, the quality repetitions are mainly with whole sentences resulting in rote learning as well as active learning by heart, in effect giving the students useful preformed phrases to re-use with required substitutions according to the specific situations. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 42 of 49 05 April 2013 at 6:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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"I'm curious as to why you chose to organize 35-hour sessions: do you feel that this is more effective than 35 separate one-hour sessions?"
-- Yes, definitely! Much less forgetting between sessions. But just as with any learning of a skill, practice has to go on. Speech and language are not unique or different from, say, stitching, or airplane flying, or playing the violin, or java programming, or keyboard typing, etc. In all areas of skilled performance, *everybody* knows that abundant, continuous practice is the only way to attain that skill. *Except* in language teaching, where it has been out of fashion for decades. :( "setting up a 10-year plan would discourage even the most enthousiastic of students" -- The 10-year thing was the average time to attain an international top champion level in sports, music, etc. It also takes about 10 years to acquire one's first language. For a second language as a mature adult I'd say that 10 months should be enough to get it fluent. But if you think of it, what is 10 years in relation to the rest of your life-time in your new country? Those 10 years will come and pass anyway, so why deliberately stay on a low level during all those years? Please read my Accent Addition article; several of your questions will be answered there. If you can read Swedish, I have it all much more elaborated and detailed in a book called "Uttalet, språket och hjärnan" (=Pronunciation, Speech and the Brain). It's based on my experience and knowledge as a notorious language learner, a Swedish language teacher, a post-doc phonetician/speech physiologist, and a physician with special interests in the neurosciences, including audiology. And I have even managed to convince my totally language-ignorant-and-uninterested wife, who doesn't even remember what "verb" means! :) So she even learnt Spanísh with me, and better than me! when we wanted to keep up with our son while he took Spanish in school! :) "Who would've thunk it!" :-D /Olle PS: Our deliberate practice with Spanish was with the RosettaStone software. We love it! Edited by okjhum on 05 April 2013 at 6:14pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 43 of 49 05 April 2013 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for your input! (And I have read your article ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 44 of 49 06 April 2013 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Since writing my first shocked reaction I have thought about the use of marathon chorusing, which of course is the prime example of a group activity.
The confused situation is referred to was indeed "the modern fad of 'communicative exercises', in which small groups of students negotiate what a sentence might look and sound like in the target language while the teacher walks around between the tables and listen a little here and a little there", as diagnosed by Okhjum. Or a situation where the teacher keeps droning on while the pupils try not to fall asleep or die before the bell saves them from the misery. Or (probably the most common situation): an alternation of the two situations. But actually those 35 hours sessions organized by Okhjum don't represent this situation, but the exact opposite - and my nearest comparison now would be military parade training, where a whole bunch of soldiers are taught to move totally in unison. Will it work? Maybe, and if you really want to be part of a disciplined parade then it may be the only efficient way you can train the participants - with eager volunteers and no rude language it might even appeal to some learners. But not to me. And I stick to my alternative: precise information about your errors. There are two things that can give you a bad pronunciation: general patterns and myriads of petty details. For instance it is a real problem to learn where the stress should be in Russian, and basically you have to learn those cases one by one by listening or through dictionary lookups because accent isn't written in Russian. But it will take forever to get through all words in a class room, and your pupils will disappear or turn to their mobile phones for entertaining. And large scale dictionary studies take some stamina plus some auditory input, because you still need to get your knowledge tested and reinforced for each word you learn. There isn't much pedagogics can do to help you from this dilemma, only hard word and a good memory (if you have one or can train the one you have). On the other habnd recurrent patterns can be as bad as lots of isolated errors, and this is where I think precise information comes in as the best cure. I have listened to a lot of immigrants and even to their offspring, and the thing that gives them away is not as much isolated errors as the general tenor of their voice, their intonation and the way they pronounce specific sounds. I have not tried individual counseling since those few fleeting moments during my school days and study years where I was grilled by the teacher, and of course not all grilling was precise - just telling people how something should sound doesn't count, you need to have your error(s) pointed out AND diagnosed in operational terms. And that's where it doesn't help to have 9 other fellahs looking out of the window (or even worse: at you) while the teacher tries to get on with the teaching he or she had planned. Pronunciation is notoriously difficult (or impossible) to train alone at home, but the exercise I have found most useful for my own part is listening closely to very short passages and transcribing them into some kind of phonetic writing. The writing part is necessary because I won't notice each and every sound unless I'm forced to write them down, and I can't retain everything in my head without consulting the things I have written down. However this is a very tiring nethod, and it lacks two vital components: SPEAKING + FEEDBACK. It could be classed with vocabulary training and grammar studies as an intensive activity which only become efficient in conjunction with a lot of input plus activating activities, read output. But military style group output as devised by Okhjum wouldn't function for me for one simple reason: I would not be there. Edited by Iversen on 08 April 2013 at 9:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 45 of 49 07 April 2013 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dear Iversen, Obviously I have not managed to make myself clear. :)
Or you would have been sold on this method, really! :) Cheers, Olle 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 46 of 49 17 April 2013 at 4:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree for the most part about deliberate practice being the most important key to success and top performance, whether talking about achieving good TL pronunciation or anything else, really, and I'll eagerly read okjhum's stuff in detail tomorrow.
However, I tend to be extremely suspicious when 'magic' numbers said to work no matter what come into play. In that vein, saying '10 years' is the same kind of nonsense as '10,000 hours', it only detracts from otherwise perfectly valid and valuable ideas. I know you said '10-year [...] was the average time to attain an international top champion level [...] For a second language as a mature adult I'd say [...] 10 months [...] to get it fluent.' -- I really hope to find a less prominent figure, and a less 'one size fits all' approach at how long very different activities take to master when I do the real reading. Anyway, thanks for something that looks really promising and interesting! --- As for experiments... Even with all their idiotic 'communicative approach' stuff, I won't question the TEFL 'authorities' when they say it takes people 1,200 hours of classes to reach C2 levels in a foreign language; but even among the C2 certified learners, pronunciation tends to be (comparatively) quite poor, precisely because of lack of practice. Presumably, incorporating okjhum's ideas instead of wasting everyone's time as he and Iversen have rightfully pointed out, we'd have more students get to C2 in less time and with better pronunciation. That's one thing I'd like to put to test, if only the 'authorities' would be willing to check the results and adapt their methods accordingly. --- On a different note, I've been observing how immigrants and their children develop their TL pronunciation for some time now. I'd be delighted to be able to do it in a systematic way, to try and correlate improvement, plateaus, and success degrees with age, in-home immersion, bilingual schooling, etc. As for the necessary measurements, comparisons and assessments, I think we'd have to set up some sort of blind Turing test and see how long immigrant subjects would take to be told from native counterparts. What do you think of that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 47 of 49 18 April 2013 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I've read Olle's article Accent Addition: Prosody and Perception Facilitate Second Language Learning in detail now. My hopes were fulfilled, so no 'magic' is ever brought up, and everything sounds... well, quite sound, even without rigorously checking its research background :)
Although I'd say it's merely full of logic and common sense, compared to most modern research stuff I've read, it fringes the category of 'genius'. Sadly, that's the very reason I don't think it'll receive a lot of attention from the ever navel-admiring establishments of SLA research and industry. Maybe in thirty years' time. @Olle: Congratulations (sort of, anyway) for it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 48 of 49 18 April 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I just read it as well and it's very interesting, and it makes me happy that someone has done some proper research into one of the most important yet most ignored aspects of language teaching. Well done from me too! The comments on prosody being more important, and worth concentrating on first before worrying too much about the individual sounds, are similar to what's said on the La prononciation française pour de vrai video series. I think it's a good point. However, I'm wondering if you have any advice on applying the method to self-teaching, since I imagine that finding a teacher who uses this method, or even a teacher who teaches pronunciation well, is nearly impossible. Would you just take some recordings of naturally-spoken phrases (say from a TV series, or Assimil-type lessons although these are often quite unnatural and over-enunciated) and play them over and over to substitute for the teacher repeating phrases over and over? From what I gather, the main feedback mechanism in this method is the student hearing their own voice, as opposed to the teacher correcting them, so it seems relatively adaptable to self-study. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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