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Learning Styles? | ||
Tags: Learner type | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 42 08 March 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is why I find the idea of learning styles so harmful: you believe that your learning style is visual, so you adopt a strategy that is essentially inadequate in developing aural skills, which are at the heart of language. But I'll let you in on a little secret -- we all remember things better when we write them down. You, me, everybody (well, every literate person, that is). You can measure this increased memory. But this is a bad measure, because you're cramming facts and language is not just a series of facts. The learning style becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the things you fail to learn are the things that are predicted as difficult to start off with. I'll let you in to another little secret -- we all find listening comprehension difficult. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5552 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 10 of 42 08 March 2011 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Does she need more of my motivational inspiration? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 42 08 March 2011 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I did not get that impression, no. But thanks anyway ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 12 of 42 08 March 2011 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Every single ancestor whose genes you have inherited (save perhaps the last few generations) have managed quite well to learn foreign languages only from hearing them. I'm sure you can do it too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 13 of 42 09 March 2011 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I have said again and again: the idea that learning styles don't exist becomes harmful when somebody thinks that things that work for one person also work for others. This may of course be true, and because most language learners aren't too extreme in any direction the advice may even be beneficial. But harm may be done by something as simple as asking people to discuss with fellow students at an early stage or about something they loath - and I can see a teacher standing there: "You there, listen to me! Cainntear and a bunch of Canadian scientists say that we all basically are the same and the differences are just something we have developed because of bad teachers and bad luck, so shut up and start talking NOW - that works for most people and then it must per definition also work for you"
OK, that was the social parameter. What about those visual learners - are we all visual learners, including those who just haven't come out of the closet yet? Let me first say that you can explain routes in two ways: 1) through an explanation in words ("go to the brown house, then left to the tall tree and ..."), 2) through a map. Maybe we could all learn to use a map, but some learn it faster than others. And some of us actually prefer a map over an explanation in words. The funny thing is that you likewise can learn grammar through babble or through 'maps', and one way of being 'visual' is this ability to see a grammar as a route diagram. This is different from the banal way you test visual tendencies, namely by showing some test persons pictures of horses while you say horse (which to me sounds eerily like Rosetta Stone!). If most language learners really are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum on all parameters then that would be consistent with the normal distribution, and this group may in fact be immune to changes in learning strategies - including the variant where you teach pupils with methods you expect them to hate like the plague. But my guess is that precisely this group won't get far in learning languages whatever you do. Unfortunately statistical methods used on samples where these rather indifferent learners dominate may show little or no effect of ANYTHING you do, or they may show changes mainly in one single direction. But this is just statistical background noise. The relevant thing is what happens to those that don't fit the ordinary pattern. Consequently I'm more interested in how good learners can become even better by refining techniques that they can see have an effect on themselves - and then it doesn't matter whether those methods have little or no effect on their fellow students. Good learners may indeed be smack in the middle of the the meetingpopints of all the gaussian bell-curves, and then it doesn't matter what methods they use, but it is more likely that they do something differently from those in the middle - and then we can let the scientists try to sort out whether this is due to innate, maybe even genetical factors or just the result of very deeptly rooted habits. As I stated in a short message which I now have removed: I doubt that Cainntear and I will ever agree on this. But we can probably agree on the desirability of trying out a wide array of methods to find those that give results - even if they only benefit a subset of the population. If they actually benefit most student then hurray, let's spread the news so that more people can try them out. What happens after that must be their own decision. Edited by Iversen on 09 March 2011 at 6:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arthaey Groupie United States arthaey.com Joined 5038 days ago 97 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 42 09 March 2011 at 12:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If this were just me avoiding listening comprehension for language learning, I'd agree that it's a cop-out. But even
in my native language, if you tell me directions or instructions verbally, I won't remember them nearly as well as if I can just read them. It's not just language learning. I am otherwise forgetful when the input is aural. And this isn't to say that I don't also work on listening comprehension -- I want to be conversational, not just literate, so I do work on that too. But for me to actually learn a new word and remember it, I need to see it. Of course, if I were in an immersion environment where I had to speak the foreign language in order to do anything, naturally I would pick it up. But studying an hour a day just isn't at all the same as immersion. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 42 09 March 2011 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's a matter of training. That is, for anyone who doesn't suffer from something like CAPD. The reason why I think it is is because I myself used to have terrible auditory memory. About five years ago I started to listen extensively to audiobooks in English (because I found some at my local library) and at the same time that my listening comprehension improved, the memory for information heard in my native language also improved noticeably. These days I rarely have to ask somebody "Sorry, could you please repeat that so I can write it down, there's no way I will remember all that ..." Directions are different though, because in my mental map there are no street names. At all. And very few 'brown houses' or such, but directions in angles, distances and potential obstacles. If you write or read, you can slow down when there's something you do not understand and read faster when you already know most of the content. When you listen to somebody talking, you can't do that. So, you have to be able to manipulate your current level of attention to match the content of the lesson, lecture, radio program or audio book. That's a skill that can be practised just like reading faster or re-reading passages of a text when that's what your level of comprehension is calling for. Edited by Bao on 09 March 2011 at 7:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| skchi Groupie United States Joined 5737 days ago 57 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 16 of 42 09 March 2011 at 5:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Wait - who said that I'm adopting a "strategy that is essentially inadequate in developing aural skills?" I don't choose learning strategies based on my belief that my learning style is visual. I choose learning strategies based the desired result. If I wanted to improve my listening comprehension or speaking skills, I wouldn't spend my study time reading. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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