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Which learning methods are most indelible | ||
Tags: Memory | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| 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 17 of 28 10 June 2011 at 3:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hmm... I'm always dubious of examples. Ask yourself this: are you more likely to remember examples of words you learned in a particular way if you learn lots of words that way or if you only learned a few. Either way, being wrong and getting corrections is a very slow way to learn.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6164 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 28 10 June 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Whoops! Typo done in haste! Now corrected. I am so embarazada about that one..... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 19 of 28 10 June 2011 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Expressing yourself orally is an excellent way to learn, probably the fastest there is. However, most errors are not corrected, so I would agree that if you seek perfection, corrections alone are not an effective way to learn. Nevertheless, trying to express yourself and correcting yourself when the message is not getting across is both a powerful and effictive way to learn. The whole process of creating a new sentence based on previous knowledge is a strong one; figuring out how things should be said and giving it a try is a powerful way to learn and corrections received after such an attempt are easier to remember. 3 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 20 of 28 11 June 2011 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree, but I would start by saying simple things correct and slowly, then increasing in complexity and speed.
It doesn't really work that way in practice. I was blogging the other day about discovery learning (warning: a bit long and incoherent) and I pointed out that while repeated classroom experiments are individually independent, multiple reformulations of your target language are not. After three or four incorrect sentences in your target language, the other person normally knows what you mean, so in a general conversation, you rarely get corrected/correct yourself to the extent that you produce a 100% correct utterance. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 28 13 June 2011 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
In my opinion, this section of the OP is an excellent manifestation of the power of the lexical approach. Simply put, it emphasizes learning entire phrases or sentences that allow the learner to start "making sense" immediately. What is important to remark here is that the learner matched the phrase to the situation. This has a powerful feedback effect because the learner is encouraged by having been able to say something right in such a short period. And, it must be emphasized, the user is spontaneously picking up all the necessary grammar and vocabulary. I don't know Michel Thomas well enough to comment on how his method related to all of this. And of course the lexical approach has many variations. But I do believe that an approach using a combination of set phrases and other components can achieve excellent results very quickly. 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 22 of 28 14 June 2011 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thomas took an approach that is superficially diametrically opposed to this idea. That is to say that Thomas avoided fixed phrases and idiomatic lexical bundles to the greatest extent possible. (He did introduce one or two early on -- eg "lo siento" for "sorry" in Spanish.) Instead he focuses on variety, and building sentences from the ground up. Even when he hits an idiom, he normally starts from the ground up. He taught "llamar" (call) and reflexive verbs, and then gets you to produce "I call myself" independently in order to teach you how to say the equivalent of "my name is" in the Romance language courses. And he doesn't revise it much or revisit it, because it's A) not that important, and B) quite easy. There is a parallel at a deeper level, though. Thomas had a knack for picking sentences that managed to appeal on an emotional level despite being fairly vague. "I want it, but I don't have it," isn't Shakespeare, but it carries a lot of personal meaning for everyone. The reason phrase-based learning appeals is because you learn something that is immediately useful. The first few hours seem very productive. But it's still an isolated item, and learning individual items is a slow way to learn. A well-planned consistent structure may not give the same immediate results, but only a couple of hours later you've gained a massive amount of independence in your language use, and phrases will actually be a lot easier to learn too because you understand what they're built of. Phrase-based learning gives a false impression of rapid progress, in my view. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 23 of 28 14 June 2011 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
And when is the little new one going to appear? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 24 of 28 14 June 2011 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
If I may quote myself here, "But I do believe that an approach using a combination of set phrases and other components can achieve excellent results very quickly." I added the "other components" precisely to emphasize that phrase-based learning is not the only method. (Before I forget, I do not think that the verb llamarse as in "me llamo" qualifies as an idiom in Spanish. The fact that it can be translated in English as "my name is" does not make it an idiom. But that's a different debate.) The issue here is that Arekkusu observed, with some surprise as he pointed out, that a total beginner, after minimal instruction, was able a) to utter a meaningful sentence and b) in the right context. It's a small but very significant achievement. I don't want to extrapolate and say that learning a language is as simple as learning hundreds of phrases. No, I'm simply saying that as part of a learning strategy, the study of set phrases can play an important role. But to come back to the simple example given by Arekkusu, what took place from a learning perspective? A number of things. First of all, the learner spontaneously acquired a correct sequence of sounds (phonology) and a sequence of words (grammar and vocabulary). Obviously, the person had no analytical knowledge of all of this. Secondly, the person has learned presumably to recognize and understand this sentence. And thirdly, this person is now able to perceive situation in which this phrase can be used. This is a lot in just one little sentence. Without getting carried away, we can say that the person has started to speak the language correctly. Of course, we ultimately want the learner to spontaneously create correct phrases. And voilà, that is exactly why I believe a combination of set phrases and analytical study can be so effective. You want the encouraging feedback of immediate communication with the analytical capability to infinitely generate new phrases. What's the alternative to this? It's exactly what we see so often with people who have studied languages in school for many years and are ashamed to even open their mouth. And when they do, we wish they hadn't. Edited by s_allard on 14 June 2011 at 7:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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