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Growing Participator approach | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| LanguaFlash Diglot Newbie United States LanguaFlash.com Joined 5684 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English*, Swahili | Message 1 of 5 25 June 2009 at 5:58am | IP Logged |
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I am currently taking a summer semester in Linguistics with SIL at the University of North Dakota. One of the classes is Second Language Acquisition tought by Greg Thomson.
I would be interested to hear anyone's experience using his approach, what they thought of it or how it worked. I am not sure I agree with all of the aspects of it and wanted to get an opinion from the wider community. Thanks, Jeff 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6082 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes  1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 5 25 June 2009 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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Could you possibly describe it for those of us (Like me) who have NO idea what this is please?
Thanks TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 5 25 June 2009 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
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I'm not that familiar with Thomson, but on the evidence of this article, I don't really rate him.
On a superficial level, the article quotes examples of quite horrendous "teacherese" -- things that just would never occur in natural English. Here's a classic *These are some girls -- I've heard similar in various courses (I left a job once partly because they asked me to teach children phrases like that). If he needs to resort to non-English as the only way to demonstrate the rules of English, he can't be doing it right! Looking a bit more closely, take his notion of "visual scaffolding" of the language being taught. The example used in the article is a picture (unseen) of a man mending a net and a woman cleaning her rifle. Let's look at the sentences he produces from this. “This man is mending a net. This woman is cleaning her rifle. Etc. Etc.” “Where is the net?” “Where is the rifle?” “Is there a rifle in this picture?” “Is there a net on this page?” “Who is washing something? Show me a picture of a woman who is cleaning something.” “Show me a woman who is cleaning a rifle. Where is the man who is mending a net?” “Show me the net which the man is washing. Where is the rifle which the woman is cleaning?” There is a shedload of concepts in there, and the ones that are "visually scaffolded" aren't in the majority (man, woman, rifle, net etc). What concepts presented are not scaffolded? 1) Mending. I cannot draw a picture that is unambiguously mending a net rather than making one from scratch. 2) Possession. I cannot draw a picture that demonstrates ownership of an object. 3) Indefinite article. Similar to 2 -- if I can't show ownership, I can't explicitly show a lack of ownership. 4) Page vs picture. Well, that's assuming there's only one picture on the page. If there is, then the meaning of neither word is presented. 5) The functions of "show me" and "where is" seem to collapse together -- there will be little need for the brain to distinguish Even then, there's still some ambiguity. The word "rifle" specifically refers to a long range projectile weapon with a spiral of grooves in the barrel that cause the bullet to spin as it leaves the weapon, improving distance and accuracy -- but there's not enough information for the learner to see this. A learner may overgeneralise to "two-handed gun", "gun that can be carried by a person" or even just "gun". The sentences he uses are heavily loaded with concrete vocabulary, because that's all that you can actually draw. However, concrete vocabulary carries a heavy cognitive load. The sentences he gives would be relatively difficult for a native speaker to understand (that is to say that they would take longer to understand, not that the native speaker would fail to understand them) because there is more information than the human brain wants in one go. Proper teaching of function words -- articles, particles, pronouns and such -- allows you to produce sentences that don't overload the brain from the word go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 4 of 5 25 June 2009 at 10:18pm | IP Logged |
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In essence the article illustrates all the pitfalls of relying exclusively on comprehensible input.
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| Anno Triglot Newbie Israel acquiringkorean.word Joined 5631 days ago 29 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English, Korean, Dutch Studies: Turkish, Mongolian, Modern Hebrew, French | Message 5 of 5 27 November 2011 at 11:51am | IP Logged |
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LanguaFlash,
Have you used Growing Participator Approach to study any languages since you posted this. . . if so I'm really curious how it worked out. I've used it a an awful lot of Korean and Hebrew and found it immensely helpful -- there's a whole bunch of articles and info on the approach at Growing Participator Approach website. ---- Hebrew Learning Blog Korean Learning Blog "The key to success is making a million mistakes. . now let's make as many as fast as we can!" Edited by Anno on 27 November 2011 at 12:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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