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LINGQ: Explicit grammar instruction | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6365 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 41 of 69 15 August 2007 at 2:30am | IP Logged | ||
I fully agree with this. People crave structure in language learning, but neglect input. Grammar doesn't teach a language as much as it retroactively attempts to explain it. What teaches a language are thousands upon thousands of absorbed examples of how the language is spoken and written; what is heard, and what is read. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6701 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 42 of 69 15 August 2007 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||
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For children learning their native language, as far as input goes, they also have the benefit of, say, body language and correction and concrete, real world objects being visible, which you don't get at all from text or audio sources. You have the context of the text and the audio and that's it.
I've also heard that the input method works best with both audio and writen material used concurrently. I'm assuming this refers primarily to audiobooks. I have never had luck finding audiobooks. Foreign language ones are apparently expensive, and I'm doubting that I'd find anything I'd particularly like -- after all, the majority of audiobooks in English seem to be for, say, Dean Koontz or John Grisham or Dan Brown or the ilk -- authors which I'd never concievably voluntarily read. And one really major point still stands -- listening to someone else reading a book out loud drives me nuts. Occaisionally some people are good at it. However, I'm not willing to drop 20-40 dollars on a foreign audiobook for the sake of finding out whether or not I'll be able to put up with the speaker. So I think in my case, given my aversion to/inability to find audiobooks, I'm generally disadvantaging myself by removing an amount of input, and as such I do feel the need to replace this with grammar. In any case, does anyone have any general advice about using input? Neither my German nor Russian are at the stage where I'm going to be likely to find comprehensible texts outside of, say, children's books, and looking every other word up is incredibly tiring and distracting. I've tried one of those point-an-click, in application dictionary utilities -- like Babylon, or whatever LingQ uses -- but I found the dictionary lacking and the interface rather slow and bulky. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 43 of 69 15 August 2007 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
I disagree with this. I accept that some persons may have such bad feelings about explicit grammar that they simply can't benefit from it. I even find it likely that some persons primarily learn through subconscious processes. But for those of us that don't have those problems or that kind of wiring it is a simple matter of logic and experience that we profit from knowing something about the language we are studying. It should be simple logic that if you know which morphological forms you can expect in a certain language and with which endings then the sorting out of these things in real texts is easier than if you have to find the x thousand examples yourself and then sort them out in your subconscious mind. Besides your subconsciousness doesn't go on holiday just because you ALSO let your consciousness do some of the work, it is still working even if you do sit down to learn a table or a syntactical rule. And what's more: if you have some idea about the possible constructions in a languages (ie. how do you recognize the subject, different kinds of objects, what are the main factors that influence case after prepositions et cetera) then you also possess some tools that make it easer to decode a sentence, whether it happens on the subconscious or the conscious level. It may be possible to learn a language without ever studying the language in a structured fashion, but if you don't have a grudge against those methods they will speed up the process. Time is the key factor here. One reason that grammar studies have come under fire from some schools of pedagogics is that they have been seen as a process where you should learn all the grammar sequentially and wait with real reading/listening until you have learnt all 483 pages in your teacher's preferred grammar book. But grammar studies do not have to be sequential any more than reading/writing/listening, and the study of grammar should always be undertaken concurrently with as much input as the learner can take. Being able at a conscious level to see how grammar helps you crack an otherwise incomprehensible text is immensely motivating, while reading about the rules without seeing them function in practice isn't. Edited by Iversen on 15 August 2007 at 4:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6365 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 44 of 69 15 August 2007 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps you could try reading books in these languages with accompanying translations. For example, in German, you could alternate between reading Kafka in English and in German. Instead of focusing on learning each word in each sentence, I would focus on gleaning the overall meaning of the text, and alternate between the two until I was as comfortable reading the text in German as I was in English. If I found it too difficult to do with Kafka-esque novels, I would try novels written with children in mind or short stories, and use progressively more challenging texts as my abilities improved. This would teach me to read German without grammar, but through input. If combined with an audio reading of the text, it would also teach me to speak and understand the oral language, but even without audio, it would still teach me to read and write in the language, and without memorization, but with fun (provided the stories are interesting ones!). The idea is to maximize comprehensible input. The fastest means of input are by sight and sound (reading and listening). Reading target literature with translations would enable you to directly take advantage of one of these modes of input - reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 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 45 of 69 15 August 2007 at 4:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I originally gave up using bilingual texts for intensive reading because I discovered that the translations generally were too 'free' to be trustworthy. In other words, even with bilinguals I still had to do my own ultra-literal translation (after looking up lots of words, checking endings and so on) to crack the foreign text. And the third-part translation became even more irrelevant at a later stage where I didn't need to make a formal translation myself because the foreign text had become less opaque, - at most it could be used as a reference to check my accuracy.
However the thread about Listening-reading made me realise that the real point in using translations is to make it possible to do extensive reading or listening at an earlier stage than it would normally be possible. For instance I have made bilingual texts of the interlaced type for many of H.C.Andersen's works, and using these is almost as good as listening while reading a translation (though without the effect on listening skills/pronunciation), - this would not function with the versions in columns. However the column-wise texts are useful for listening-while-reading, and because the meaning of the spoken text is provided it is possible to do extensive reading/listening long before it would otherwise be possible. That's a good thing. The bad news is that even a good a translation doesn't provide all relevant information. I personally look up words even if they have been translated in order to know the main forms, their morphological type, their other meanings - and simply to remember them better (and I also put some of them on word lists). In my world extensive reading/writing can only be the main/only activity for language learners that are so advanced that they only have to deal with minor comprehension problems. And at that point translations are irrelevant and have been so for a long time. Edited by Iversen on 15 August 2007 at 4:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7034 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian | Message 46 of 69 15 August 2007 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been to the link provided by Leosmith and read it. I have scanned the book, Success with Foreign Languages.
In the first link we have FSI defending what they do in the classroom. To me the FSI materials that I have seen for Portuguese and Cantonese were unusable with their heavy emphasis on learning grammar points on a timetable imposed by the system with lots of repetitive drills. They claim that with their methods 75% of FSI’s full-time students achieve their goals. I doubt that based on the dismal failure of similar language schools for Canadian government employees very few of whom end up able to use the language at work. In the article the emphasis is on learning aptitudes and learning styles relative to classroom learning.I think that the classroom is a very inefficient place to learn languages. The article does admit that learning is more efficient if the learner can be provided with what he or she needs, rather than follow the curriculum. The article is a little ambiguous about how much grammar instruction is needed.."explicit grammar instruction of some kind" " a broad overview" "appear to be" helpful etc. The most important statement points out that “The single most significant factor in language acquisition is time on task. Yet they cannot resist implying that grammar needs to be presented in a sequenced way, that the teacher's awareness of what the learner is doing, and the teachers skills etc.are essential to the learner's success In other words the teacher and the classroom at the centre. In the book on the 7 heroes, most of them seemed to operate on a "meaningful input " pattern. Language learning is to me, a process of linking. Linking sounds to words, words to meaning, words to other words, words and phrases to contexts, people to people, etc. This eventually creates links between the neurons in the brain. (Thus the name of our system LingQ) There is no shortage of audio material with text today and this is increasing.We are going to collect such material and make it available free of charge at a sister web site. We are encouraging our learners to create such content and make it available to our learning community. Anything we get free will be on this site. There will be podcasts, livbrivox type free audio books with text, as well as an ever increasing amount of content that is created by individuals and shared through our system. This will not be on LingQ but on a sister site and available for download. Only those who want to use our functionality will come to LingQ. Yes the functions on LingQ may seem slow and cumbersome to some, and the dictionaries we use now for languages other than English have their shortcomings, but these problems will be overcome. I believe that technology today makes it possible to liberate the language learner from the teacher imposed agendas and allow them to pursue subjects of interest in the language. The ability to choose content of interest, and the level of difficulty desired, and the ability to ask a tutor for help when the learner wants it, and to consult other people learning the same language, or speaking the same language are key if we want to ensure the most important element of language learning success that is to maximize "time on task". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Quinn Senior Member United States Joined 6329 days ago 134 posts - 186 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Spanish | Message 47 of 69 15 August 2007 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||
I found this article very interesting. Thank you for the link, Leo! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fredmf Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6469 days ago 43 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 48 of 69 15 August 2007 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Zuangzhi,
Do the Canadian government trainees of whom you speak possess the same level of motivation for language learning as the diplomats who might be attending the Foreign Service Institute? As I'm sure everyone is aware, the U.S. foreign service is highly selective and those who get in need to make sure they do whatever they have to do to stay in. And the paper stresses that motivation is a key factor to the FSI program's success. So in order to draw a proper comparison, you'd need to have similar levels of prestige and motivation. Do you happen to know whether that is the case? Fred 1 person has voted this message useful |
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