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Learning Styles? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Sanghee Groupie United States Joined 5060 days ago 60 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 33 of 42 10 March 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I want to 2nd what Arthaey said in response to kmart, but also expand on it a little bit since people keep talking about how in the past (and even currently), people were able to learn languages without reading and writing. I'm going to assume that most of them had an actual need to learn the language. They were probably surrounded by people speaking that other language and could practice and hear it as much as they wanted. They didn't need to be able to read or write to learn a language because they could learn naturally. Now, we often learn languages without an actual need, when we aren't surrounded by people who speak the language. It'd be nearly impossible for me to learn Korean by ear because I'm not around enough speakers. I could watch dramas, but then I'm not interacting with anything, not speaking back, only listening. Is it a necessity for me to see a word to remember it? Not completely, I learned a few words just by listening to songs and watching dramas. But for me to be able to appropriately use it in my most common way of communication (typing), I need to see it to know how to spell it. It's easier for me to remember a word if I can think of how it's spelled and I more easily flop syllables around if I can't imagine the word itself. Also, for learning new words, it's easier if I can read them, write them down, and continue to practice them. If I only hear them, then I essentially can't practice them and will probably end up forgetting them because I don't really have native speakers to practice with.
So, I think when some people talk about needing to see a word to remember it, they're being truthful. For some of us the best or even only way we have to practice is through writing, so if we only hear a word then it probably wont stick. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 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 34 of 42 10 March 2011 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Similarly, the idea that learning styles exist becomes harmful when it suggests to someone that a particular way of learning will work for them. But it has the unique problem of being able to tell people that a particular way of learning won't work for them, and actually frighten people off trying something -- like Arrekusu's wife who refuses to do the class as presented because she doesn't think it fits her learning style.
That's a bad teacher. If a teacher believes all people are fundamentally more similar than dissimilar, then if students aren't learning, the teacher must accept responsibility and change the teaching.
But that's not quite the way it is generally seen. When I did my English teaching certificate, we did a "learning styles" survey. In a class of 18, there were only 2 "balanced learners". I was one, and the other was an American girl who was very good at Spanish, which she'd started learning as a teenager. The tutor actually asked us if we'd lied on any of the questions, because apparently it's very rare to find any balanced learners, let alone two in the same class.
Don't confuse "learning styles" with "individual learner differences". Learning styles categorise the 6 billion people in the world into between 4 and 7 categories (depending on the system). If generalisations from statistics are untrustworthy, learning styles must be disregarded on the grounds that they are still a generalisation that lumps us together with 1,000,000,000 of our neighbours on the surface of this planet.
I disagree. You cannot prove a theory by looking at the exceptional cases -- outliers do not define a trend. What the exceptional cases give us is a better view of the variables to be investigated -- we then have to investigate whether those variables truly affect the general case of not. For example, consider autistic spectrum disorders. It's called a spectrum because there's a lot of variation in the actual amount of disability or extra ability that the individual has. It was once widely held that this spectrum continued through the "normal" (statistically speaking) population and autism was just another variable in the human makeup, and what we call "autism" is just the extreme end of that scale. We now know that autism comes from a fundamental difference in brain development in infancy, so you are either autistic, or you are not. While you could say that some autistic people are only "slightly autistic", no-one is "slightly not autistic".
Ah, so now we get to the difference between us: I want to be a teacher, and my principle goal isn't to help the good learners get better, it's to turn as many people as possible into good learners.
Well we agree in this much, then: successful learners do something differently from unsuccessful learners. So if that's the case, why don't we simply try to make the unsuccessful learners do what the successful learners do, rather than trying to find something new?
Yes, we agree on this. Even though I believe there is an optimal way of learning and teaching any subject, I do not know what it is, and we have to keep trying out different methods if we're ever to find it. However, because I believe there is an optimal way, I believe our search for better ways of learning should always be moving towards the centre -- building on what our techniques have in common, rather than on what makes them different.
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 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 35 of 42 11 March 2011 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm not very interested in the results of using the current test batteries. The point is that if you are a succesfull learner then your study methods apparently fit your learning style as a glove. If not, then the search for more suitable methods should continue. The result of a test can only be used as a suggestion. Cainntear may indeed be seeing things from the standpoint of a teacher, where I see it from the standpoint of a homelearner - and being one of those is already something that sets you apart from the main group of learners because it forces you to take your own decisions about your methods. As a homelearner you don't have the silent wish to make 30 pupils shut up and learn in unison. His last paragraph also marks an important difference: I do not think that there is one optimal way, but there are certainly many things that don't work for anybody (extreme procrastination, for one) and other techniques which would be useful for most learners if they just could be convinced to try them out. Language teaching ought to be a buffet, not a fixed menu. Edited by Iversen on 11 March 2011 at 3:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6116 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 36 of 42 11 March 2011 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is what you said
And I said that you didn't need to see words to learn them and gave you an example of where you had previously learned hundreds if not thousands of words without seeing them. You haven't refuted my argument - maybe you can learn words quicker, or more easily if you see them, but you certainly are capable of learning words without seeing them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 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 37 of 42 11 March 2011 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Note exactly. If you are a successful learner then your methods are adequate. It does not prove that other methods wouldn't be more effective, but as an individual, there comes a point where you have to balance the benefits of finding a better way against the time spent researching.
And again you're talking about bad teachers, but also bad class sizes -- when I talk about optimal ways of learning, I'm talking about a lot fewer than 30 in a class!
I believe in differences, but I believe that they are minor variations, and I believe that all optimal solutions are closely related -- a single, continuous "optimal zone". Is our only difference the size of this zone? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6264 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 38 of 42 23 March 2011 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Learning styles vary a lot from person to person. That is one truth that emerges, even
from reading this forum, not to speak of real-life experience. Some people would be attracted by Michel Thomas courses advertised as requiring no writing down of material, while I personally am more than happy to write things down. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 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 39 of 42 23 March 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Againg, that's preferences, not style. I nearly passed up on Michel Thomas precisely because I was keen on writing stuff. Just as preferring cake to cabbage doesn't mean that cake is a better food for me than cabbage, preferring writing to speaking doesn't mean theat writing is better for me than speaking. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| amethyst32 Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5641 days ago 118 posts - 198 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, French | Message 40 of 42 23 March 2011 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This has been an interesting subject to think about. I used to talk about my learning style all the time, but now I'm not so sure. I mean, we all learn our mother tongue in basically the same way. We go to school and we're taught in classes where we learn subjects together in basically the same way. Yes it's true that some learn fast and others not so fast, but on the whole the class keeps up. So, is language study so different from everything else we learn that we can't take it in unless it's done in the way which we like best? If the answer is "no" (which I think it is), then it's probably a preference and not a style; Maybe the dogma of "learning styles" has been around for so long and has been repeated so often that it's just taken as a given that we all have one.
Anyway, it's not every day that I get a new way of thinking about something I'd taken for granted. This forum's great; I hope I don't become too addicted! :-) EDIT: Spelling Edited by amethyst32 on 23 March 2011 at 9:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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