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"Myths" of foreign language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5210 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 57 of 72 10 May 2010 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Voilà. As Iversen has put it, don't we all agree that it is best to avoid mistakes in the first place? Actually, I think this debate has probably reached the point of diminishing returns. I would certainly agree with Iversen that a good grammar book will explain how the language functions and help us avoid many mistakes. I'm sure Cainntear probably agrees. All of us undoubtedly have shelves of grammar books, methods and dictionaries. Indeed, I suspect that in practice we probably do not disagree that much and that this debate is somewhat rhetorical. By the way, if we go back to the origin of the debate about always learning words in context, I think we all agree that none of us thinks that words should always be learned in context. That myth is taken care of. So, where and why do we disagree? Someone suggested that it's about learning styles. I'm beginning to think that as well. Otherwise, we seem to be going in circles. I've used on a few occasions the idea of the best or most efficient way of learning a particular feature in the target language. For example, I believe that for oral fluency, the French grammatical gender system is best acquired by practicing short phrases highlighting gender syntax. This should be used IN ADDITION to whatever resources one has access to. Don't worry, I will not rehash why I think this. Why do people make mistakes in a target language? Obviously, the trite answer is because they haven't learned the right forms in the first place. In adult language learning, it's more complicated because there is the problem of language transfer or interaction with the native language. I gave the example of someone saying "ne laissez pas le feu sortir" as an example of overgeneralisation of "sortir" for "to go out" Cainntear replies: "Poor example -- there really is no need to overgeneralise "sortir" to that extent. If we learn it as "exit", it's possible to underuse it, but not overuse it." This illustrates, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of why people make mistakes. Of course, there is no need to overgeneralize "sortir". It's not a question of need. It just happens. Let me give a different example I hear all the time. In French, one indicates age with the verb avoir (e.g. J'ai 15 ans). In English, we use "to be", as in: I'm 15 years old. What is a common mistake of Engish-speakers in French? Predictably, it is: Je suis 15 ans. The other variant of this mistake is "Je suis fini" for "I'm finished". People familiar with French will know that "je suis fini" means "It's over for me" and that one should say "J'ai fini". What is happening here of course is that learners are spontaneously overgeneralizing or overtranslating the French "être" to the contexts where English "to be" is used. We all do this as we are groping our way through a foreign language, and this is exactly why foreigners sound foreign when speaking a language. Now, as Cainntear has rightly pointed out, if people learn the distinction right from the beginning, then they won't make the mistake. But that just begs the question. If you learn that "sortir" is only for exiting and not for "being extinguished" from the get-go, then you won't have a problem. Therein lies the fundamental issue that is the 800 lb gorilla lurking in this thread. What is the best way to acquire this distinction? How do you learn that être should not be generalized to "je suis 15 ans" and "je suis fini"? I don't claim to have the only answer. In fact, I think there are many methods, strategies and styles all aiming at the same goal: help the learner use the right forms and avoid the wrong ones. We know that mistakes are inevitable; we want to learn from them and not repeat them. What really counts here is results. We are all learners and teachers of sorts, and we share a love of languages. I've taken a position based on my experience, my theoretical position on language acquisition and my learning style. It works for me; it doesn't have to work for everybody. Edited by s_allard on 11 May 2010 at 3:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5791 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 58 of 72 10 May 2010 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I don't believe in learning styles. I believe that there each subject has its own optimal learning strategy. If you have developed a successful strategy for learning one thing, it is tempting to call it your learning "style" and try to apply it to learning other things. This only works if it is appropriate to what you're trying to learn. The other aspect of what is perceived as "learning styles" is the learner's initial knowledge. If you already know something, by definition you don't have to learn it, and that leads to a difference in teaching. For example, because I already knew some French and Spanish, I could identify for myself the the O->UE and E->IE changes were not confined to verbs. My initial state of knowledge affected what I needed to learn, so I appear to learn in a different way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5791 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 59 of 72 10 May 2010 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
What is wrong with my brain today? I typed NÓR and ÓR and instead of NÓV and ÓV but I spotted it and corrected it. How on Earth could I have written PÓL instead of PÓRT? Maybe I should get a CAT scan or something...
Ah, interesting -- I did not know that. So in the end it may boil down to two phonemes that are realised the same in an unstressed position, but different in a stressed position. In order to genuinely make sense of this, then, you've got to be exposed to the morpheme in a stressed position early on, and have the link between the stressed and unstressed morphemes made clear. In the case of radical stem changing verbs, that's easy: infinitive and anything but the vos and vosotros forms in the present should do the trick. Nueve is self-demonstrating but noventa may need explicitly shown in relation to nueve. Hmm... interesting, very interesting.
There's no absolute agreement on what constitutes a syllable in Spanish according to the few papers I've read on the subject. I'm pretty certain in|ovar has been proposed for this by some.
Too complex to be presented, certainly, but I would say that anyone building a syllabus has to support the learner in developing an understanding of these rules, because the native speaker has an intuitive understanding of the rules. It's only once you understand the rules that you can understand the native speaker, and understanding the native is understanding the language. Edited by Cainntear on 10 May 2010 at 11:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5210 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 60 of 72 11 May 2010 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Let me first apologize for prolonging a debate that I myself qualified as "going in circles", but I really couldn't let this comment pass because it illustrates, in my opinion, a theoretical distinction that is not only erroneous but can lead to poor results. Unlike Cainntear, I take the position that gender in French is much more about grammar than about vocabulary. Yes, all French nouns fall into one of two classes, masculine or feminine. Now the significance of this is not in terms of the meaning of the word, although there is the important issue of logical gender when referring to living beings (e.g. le juge and la juge). There is nothing masculine about LE soleil and nothing feminine about LA lune. Grammatical gender is a purely formal and "meaningless" attribute of a noun. The fundamental role of gender is elsewhere. The real significance of gender--and the reason why we speak of grammatical gender--is that it determines how other syntactic elements of the contextual utterance are adjusted phonetically and morphologically to agree with the gender class of the head noun. As with any language with a similar system of agreement, one has to correctly identify the gender of the head noun very early in the process of speaking an utterance in order to get the agreements right. If you can identify the right gender class because of a class group based on the ending of a word, there is no need to hesitate. And there are a number of such groups in French. The big problem is that there are many situations where word ending is a poor indicator of gender. These may be called "fuzzy" sets, but the problem is that many learners and even quite advanced students end up with fuzzy syntax, that is to say the wrong forms. So, the key issue here is syntax. And of course this is what grammar books are about. We learn the grammar and supposedly plug the word into the right sequence or "buckets". That's the theory. Reality is very different. Why do people who have studied French grammar make so many gender agreement mistakes? Why is grammatical gender (besides verb conjugation) the biggest problem of English-speakers in French? My position is that this problem stems from the fact that too often the nouns--especially the tricky ones-- are learned separately from syntactic context. For example, if you look up the word "diabète" in the dictionary, you will see "diabète (m)" indicating masculine form. The problem is that this word is very "feminine" looking because many words ending in -e and -ète are feminine. Inevitably, there is some confusion. For example, the majority of words ending in -ure are feminine but certain words such as chemical compounds (e.g. le fluorure de sodium) are masculine. We can assume that native speakers naturally acquire all these complex rules for figuring out the correct gender. As foreign adult learners, we can speed up the process by using grammar books and lists of words that give us the rules and exceptions for determining noun gender. But the real issue is syntax; how do you put all the elements together quickly with the right endings and in the right order? By neglecting syntax, too often we end up knowing a lot of words but not how to use them properly. That's the problem. Edited by s_allard on 11 May 2010 at 12:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 LauraM Pro Member United States Joined 5132 days ago 77 posts - 97 votes Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 72 11 May 2010 at 1:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As someone who has been teaching and learning for several years, I quite (respectfully) disagree! Some people
are more visual, some more auditory, etc. Whether you call it learning styles or learning "strategies" sounds like mere semantics, which I know is the "in" thing to do when we are so fixated on giving everything a label these days. But I do think you raise some very valid points. Although hopefully open to other opinions....thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! You often have such insight!
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5210 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 62 of 72 12 May 2010 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I suspect that we are not talking about the same idea of "learning style" here. There is rate or speed of learning based on prior knowledge. People who know French have a much easier time with Spanish, at least initially, than speakers of English because there are many similarities between French and Spanish. Obviously, the more prior knowledge one has about a subject, the faster one "learns" the subject. Learning style is something else. Whether we call it style or optimal learning strategy, I think we are referring to the way individuals approach or process information. Anybody who is or has been in the world of teaching knows that students don't seem to hear, see or feel things exactly the same way. I say to the classroom: "Turn to page 16" and, inevitably, some people turn to page 6, others to 60, and others ask their neighbour: "what page?" We talk about learning style and the big distinction between the people who need to see how a language is written or transcribed and those who have a good auditory memory. But we can also speak of teaching style. We've all had teachers we've liked and those we've not. There are various factors such as speaking voice, gender and age but mostly it has to do with the approach, the way the subject is presented. Every year dozens of books on the grammar of the major languages are published although the grammar of these languages has not changed much in the last 50 years. But the presentation is what has changed. Obviously, things like the examples and cultural references change in order to keep the content fresh, but the fundamental language facts have not changed much over the years. When it comes to learning languages, I've always felt that the so-called knack for languages boils down to three things: facility for mimicking sounds, good memory and ability to quickly perceive visual or auditory patterns. That said, since these three skill are unequally shared, it just makes sense that people have different ways of learning the same subject. Edited by s_allard on 12 May 2010 at 5:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5791 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 63 of 72 12 May 2010 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'm sorry if it comes across as semantics or some kind of rebranding exercise, but I see a genuine difference in meaning between the two words. "Style" is something personal -- it is a personal choice or an innate attribute. The modern teacher is expected to adapt his/her teaching to his students' learning style. "Strategy" is entirely less personal. A strategy can be taught and learnt in a way that a "style" can't. I argue that any apparent "learning style" is not an inate characteristic of the learner, but merely the student trying to apply previously effective strategies to the task at hand. But if a strategy is not effective, it should not be used. I argue that teachers should teach an appropriate strategy to their students, so that they can handle the subject or skill being taught in its own terms. Adapting the material to suit the learner's "style" means that the student does not develop the appropriate strategies to continue learning, and while it gives apparent success in the short term, it causes problems in the longer term. Now I am not saying all students must be treated the same -- no, not all. What I am saying is that the majority of individual learner differences are differences in past experience and prior knowledge. You certainly can't ignore these. However, I do not believe it is in the interests of the student or the teacher to see these differences as permanent and immutable. No -- I think we need to address these gaps and compensate for them, with the view to helping them to develop a new and more suitable strategy for the topic at hand. What do I mean by "appropriate" or "suitable" strategies? You mention the classic "multiple intelligence" categories -- visual, auditory etc. Applied to language teaching, that usually leads to "lots of reading/writing for the benefit of visual learners, lots of speaking/listening for auditory learners". However, language is an auditory phenomenon. Writing is not a basic linguistic skill, but a layer of abstraction -- it has been described by some as a "picture" of the sounds produced by the speaker. A course adapted to the "visual" learner cannot teach language efficiently, if at all. Therefore a student must be assisted in developing his or her auditory abilities in order to learn language. Pictures can be used to help (some people like tongue-position diagrams, for example), and that is a case of using existing preferences/competences/strategies in a way that supports the development of newer, more appropriate strategies. In this way, the learner gets a full palette of strategies to chose from, and is far better equipped to address problems throughout the learning process and in wider life. Edited by Cainntear on 12 May 2010 at 7:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5210 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 72 15 May 2010 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
There seems to be some confusion here about what is a learning sytle and its implications for teaching. Typical categories of learning styles or multiple intelligences include: visual-spatial, aural-auditory, logical-mathematical, kinesthetic-bodily-physical, verbal-linguistic, etc. They refer to the preferred manner in which an individual acquires and organizes information. It does not refer to the information itself. For example, some people are good at following verbal directions; others need a map. Some people approach grammar rules like mathematical equations whereas for others its more about what sounds right. The point of all of this is that learning styles, from a teaching perspective, refer not to subject matter but how to teach or adapt the content appropriately. So, the idea is not at all about giving lots of "reading/writing" to verbal-linguistic or visual learners and lots of "hearing/speaking" to the aural-auditory speakers. The idea is that for a given content, let's say pronunciation, you will use a variety of teaching materials and approaches that cater to the various learning styles. As someone who attends a few teacher conventions every year, I know that teachers are always on the lookout for innovative materials. Just recently I saw a whole approach to teaching second language grammar to young children through competitive games with teams and tournaments. Judging by the teachers flocking with cheques and credit cards in hand to the stand of the inventor, this seemed like a great idea. Right here in our own forum, there are entire sections devoted to language learning techniques, methods and materials. We see endless discussion and debates about the merits of Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, Rosetta Stone, Assimil, flash cards, word lists, repetition, parallel texts, etc. There are critics and devotees of each approach because nothing works for everybody. I find rather incomprehensible the statement: "A course adapted to the "visual" learner cannot teach language efficiently, if at all." A course adapted to the visual learner is not a course that teaches only writing. It is a course that uses visual aids and materials to convey the desired content, which could be anything including comprehension and speaking. I'm a very visual person and I love charts, maps, diagrams, drawings, comic books, video clips, whatever, that can be helpful in mastering any aspect of a language system. The problem for teachers is that a classroom will contain the various learning styles and it is difficult to please everybody. So we tend to use a method that combines a bit of everything with a fair amount of emphasis on visual aids, especially for young children, and auditory stimulus. On a different topic, I have to add that I'm still trying to understand the statement: "Writing is not a basic linguistic skill, but a layer of abstraction -- it has been described by some as a "picture" of the sounds produced by the speaker." That writing is not necessary to speak a language is self-evident. No argument there. But how is it a "layer of abstraction" (relative to what, I'm not sure but I think it must be relative to the sounds of a language)? We all know that generally speaking most writing systems are poor representations of the sounds of language. Among the Western languages, English is a major culprit. I gather that in ideographic language like Chinese the writing system does not indicate sound at all. This is why in most languages reading and writing have to be acquired separately from speaking. That said, the sounds of a language, although physically very real phenomenon are part of what one would call an abstract or arbitrary system of representation of meaning. This was discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20th century and has been the cornerstone of modern linguistics ever since. There is no intrinsic relation between representation, phonetic or written, of a word and its meaning. It's all abstract and in our heads. Writing systems are a separate system of representation, not of sounds, but of meaning. Edited by s_allard on 15 May 2010 at 9:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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