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Is mindfulness bad for language learners? | ||
Tags: Meditation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 1 of 14 15 March 2014 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi, HTLAL, long time no see! After a long hiatus from the forum and to a large extent from language learning, I'm back. And I want to write a post about meditation and mindfulness, because of an article I read today.
I started being curious about meditation a few years back and a bit more than one year ago I got a habit to form and now I meditate daily for 45 minutes. I love a lot of the things meditation has brought me, such as increased focus and this blissful and calm feeling you get after a session. So I was interested to come across an article today about mindfulness and some side effects. The article is called Breathing In vs. Spacing Out and towards the end it mentions two unwanted side effects of mindfulness practice. The first one is the fact that creativity feeds off a wandering mind. Fair enough, I do let my mind wander a lot, especially during my walks to work. The second one is of interest for language learners. I'll quote the relevant portion:
Implicit learning is of great importance for language learners, as we all know, so mindfulness practice interfering with that ability might be unwelcome news for us meditating language learners. Being mindful and whatnot, I notice a kneejerk reaction to discredit the study and tell myself that it's not true, but I'm not going to do that. I think the practice brings enough benefits for me to keep doing it despite this effect, but it's interesting to note that it might exist. However, this might be a case of correlation but not causation. There might be a correlation between being naturally good at focusing/being mindful and being naturally bad at implicit learning, but that doesn't mean that training your focus will worsen your implicit learning skills. What do you guys think? Is it a real effect and would it affect language acquisition? 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7056 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 14 15 March 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would expect mindfulness to help quiet the chattering monkeys. I admire your meditation practice and would wonder what your personal experience has been since you started doing it. My intuition tells me your gut reaction to the study implies that you have found parts of mindfulness helpful in your own personal polyglottery.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5383 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 14 15 March 2014 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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First rule of science: Never trust any scientific results that appear in the newspapers (unless the article was written by Carl Zimmer, or someone of his caliber). So I decided to dig up the original study and take a look at the methodology and the empirical results.
So far, I'm coming up blank. The university press release is unhelpful, and further Googling turns up this short comment online at Scientific American:
Apparently the results were presented at Neuroscience 2013. I grabbed the PDFs with the study and poster abstracts, and did a text search for "Stillman", one of the principal authors. Google Scholar also came up empty. Basically, it looks like we have an uncontrolled, preliminary study here. This is what scientists do to test out a hunch, before deciding whether to investigate something seriously. The preliminary answer is, "It might be worth a further look, but we don't really know anything yet." Basically, this result probably isn't much better than anecdotal evidence at this point. This isn't to knock the researchers—it sounds like a worthwhile question—but I'm giving the side-eye to their university press office and to all the reporters who shouted this "news" across half the world. And yes, I'm mindful enough to know that this is a pet peeve of mine: science can only provide us with useful knowledge if we evaluate the evidence carefully. If we go running off to announce the first, preliminary results, science offers no special guarantees of accuracy. Indeed, even the collected wisdom of an entire field can be quite wrong for 50 years or more, if their experimental design isn't rigorous enough, or if we place too much faith in p-values of 0.05 in a world where the majority of research winds up filed in a drawer. (See also the marvelous Why Most Published Research Findings are False and Norvig's Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation.) As for the larger topic, I don't practice meditation, but I do a sort of "mindful listening" and "mindful reading". I just notice things: interesting vocabulary, gender markers, grammatical constructions—and then I let them go with no particular obligation to do anything. The idea is to actually notice what's there on the page, at least some of the time, and not let little things like gender and prepositions pass unnoticed. So far, it seems to have worked, though not necessarily better than any other approach. :-) Edited by emk on 15 March 2014 at 10:25pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 14 16 March 2014 at 7:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, if meditation does anything it strengthens your ability to focus. I've found this helpful in listening to and reading material where I have less than 100% comprehension. It's very easy to let your mind wander when you only understand half of what you hear. The mind doesn't like it and starts thinking about other stuff, or at least my mind did. With a regular meditation practice I find it much easier to concentrate on the language, which not only makes the study more effective, but also increases my comprehension. I haven't done shadowing for a long time, but I suspect my shadowing ability is also better, since that's another area of study which requires focused attention. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 5 of 14 16 March 2014 at 7:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Good points. I realize the results are very preliminary, so I guess I should suspend judgement at this point. I do hope someone does some followup studies on this, as investigating possible downsides to meditation is as important as investigating the upsides (which has recieved a lot of attention since 2005).
I've thought about working with meditation to do a sort of focused listening practice, where I first let my mind calm down for five minutes or so, and then listen with eyes closed and mind focused on the sounds of the language, letting the meaning arise by itself (basically a more fomalised way of doing Iversen's "bloodhound listening" exercise). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6554 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 6 of 14 16 March 2014 at 11:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Pending some genuine research into the subject, I find it hard to believe that being alert in any way can harm your language learning. In fact I have only felt I made progress with my languages when I spent at least some of my study time on being alert (or 'mindful' with a modern buzzword) to linguistic details rather than to some amorphous general understanding. For others this may function differently, but until this has been proved in trustworthy double-blind experiments with randomized guinea pigs and relevant learning tasks I reserve the right to put my trust in my own experiences. For instance my 'listening like a bloodhound' seems to be a purebred mindfuldness technique, and I positively know that I understand more when I stop listening for the meaning in a weak language.
On the other hand I have absolutely no background for knowing what classical meditation with crossed legs and a mantra does for your language learning. It may be sidestepping the theme of this thread, but I'm curious as to whether Ari and others meditation practitioners have personal and concrete evidence for increased learning ability immediately after meditation sessions.
I try to convince my chattering monkeys to chatter in foreign languages, not to keep quiet. I like the buzz and doubt that I ever would learn to speak any language without getting to the stage where my head feels like a beehive and an ants nest put together. Edited by Iversen on 16 March 2014 at 11:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6433 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 14 16 March 2014 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Personal evidence, sure, but it's going to be anecdotal and fuzzy. There's nothing life-changing or earth-shattering about meditation for me, but it's calming and helps me focus. I used to have problems staying with anything for more than twenty minutes, and I've extended that time period, though I still can't watch a movie all the way through without pausing and doing something else. As for concrete evidence, there's another study mentioned in the article:
All in all, I suspect it's beneficial, but I also strongly suspect that if I spent these 45 minutes a day studying rather than meditating, I'd do a lot better, but improving my language learning isn't the goal of my meditation practice; it's just a nice side effect. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6448 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 14 16 March 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not quite related, but it made me think of this post. I think it depends on the kind of patterns. For example, even the most grammar-heavy of us still learn a lot of vocabulary nuances naturally from reading/input - things that are too complicated to be explained adequately in a dictionary entry.
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