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Krashen and beginners | ||
Tags: Natural method | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| dragonfly Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6277 days ago 204 posts - 233 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, Mandarin | Message 1 of 39 20 February 2011 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me it's hardly conceivable that one can progress with only original input at the beginner level without the need of a teacher, or Pimsleur, or Assimil, or MT? or anything based on their native language. What does Krashen say about how the beginnes should organize their studies? If you point to where I can read it, I'll be very greateful.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5809 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 39 20 February 2011 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I haven't seen Krashen personally address this, but the key point is this:
Krashen doesn't expect beginners to organise their own studies -- Krashen is a teacher and expects teachers to organise the learning for the student. Krashen is guilty of what I call "grammar hiding" -- he says that we should learn like children and that grammar's irrelevant and pretends that his courses have no explicit teaching of grammar. But as soon as you restrict the language to show reduced grammar, you are teaching specific grammar points. You cannot follow Krashen's guidelines as an independent learner, because you cannot hide the grammar in "examples" until you consciously know the grammar, and he says you shouldn't consciously learn the grammar until you've learnt it by absorption. But Krashen's massively self-contradictory, vague and obtuse, so you're better off ignoring him completely anyway. Edited by Cainntear on 21 February 2011 at 11:28am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6919 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 3 of 39 21 February 2011 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Cainntear.
There's a less-than-favourable site about Krashen out there on the net called 'Krashen Burn' if you want to Google it. I get fed up with all this anti-grammar nonsense! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdgjd Newbie United States Joined 4947 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes | Message 4 of 39 21 February 2011 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not proponent of "no grammar" or Krashen either, but I don't think that is what he (or Steve Kaufman) is really saying. Rather, formal grammar study will make so much more sense for the language neophyte after he/she has become familiar with the basic patterns through listening and reading. After this "input" period, then gradual exposure to formal grammar will be more likely to "stick." Edited by rdgjd on 21 February 2011 at 11:15pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5809 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 39 22 February 2011 at 1:01am | IP Logged | ||
I beg to differ. There are certain patterns within certain languages which can be learned from mere exposure, but it is wrong to assume this is universal. As a counter-example, take possessives and the (definite) article in Scottish Gaelic. Forms marked with (*) cause initial lenition in the following word. his - a* her - a their - an the: am (masculine, before b, m, p or f) an t- (masculine, before vowels) an t- (feminine, before sl, sn, sr, s+vowel) a'* (feminine, before lenitable consonants (b, p, c, g or m)) an* (feminine, before f) an (anything else) It's a remarkably complex system which is practically impenetrable without looking at the internal logic. Going by sound is practically impossible as there are many collisions of sounds. Overexposure to "a bhrochan" (his porridge) can mislead the ear, resulting in the belief that "a' brochan" is "the porridge". But porridge is a masculine word -- "the porridge" is "am brochan". Feminine "an t-" mutes the following S, so you don't know whether you're hearing a masculine word beginning with a vowel or a feminine word beginning s+vowel. Krashen was successful because he was an English speaker, and the fundaments of English are fairly straightforward: one definite article; one and a half indefinite article; nearly no conjugation of verbs for person; declension of nouns only for number; etc. These things are fairly easy to teach by "grammar hiding" as they aren't governed by complex rules. As such, you can demonstrate the rule with a few examples, and the student can generalise. But as the rules become more complex and the number of cases increases, the number of examples you need to show the rules increases exponentially. How many example do you need to show English "the"? One? Two? Three? Maybe some people still haven't caught on by 3. Maybe they'll always be looking for a counterexample that never comes, but 3's probably enough. Teaching the same thing in Gaelic, though... well, you're going to need hundreds (if not thousands) of examples to show the full contrast. You could spend years in class on the article alone. OR... you could actually teach it. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5179 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 39 22 February 2011 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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A child is perfectly content learning one sentence at a time, without any understanding of how it works. In any case, he couldn't understand rules even if you taught them to him. The result is that in the beginning, he can't even repeat the sentences correctly, and he needs years of constant exposure to get it, with the help of teachers who are at his service 24/7.
Adults don't learn the same way. We can't have constant exposure and shadowing teachers. However, we can understand rules. We also understand that a simple rule can be applied to countless sentences, and if no one explains it to us, we'll instinctively look for it. It's a huge time-saver. I used to teach for Berlitz and they use a no-grammar method. To this day, I remain convinced that the only reason they do is so that any teacher can teach the method without any prior knowledge. But students were constantly puzzled and always wanted to know what the rules were. And I understood them because I too would want to know. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Artek Triglot Newbie Poland Joined 4828 days ago 6 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 7 of 39 22 February 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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What an excellent post,Cainntear. My goodness,Scottish Gaelic looks like another structural monster alongside languages like Finnish, Korean, or even Polish. All this only proves again that there really are easy and hard languages and native speakers of grammaticaly hard ones have a certain advantage when it comes to foreign language study. I don't envy native English speakers when they have to tackle something like Russian or one of those mentioned earlier. It's one thing when your verbs, nouns and adjectives have one or two forms in a given tense. It's a totally different story when you have to get used to, say, fifteen (especially, without any formal explanation of rules, as Krashen migh suggest). All the greater respect to those who conquer such beasts :-).
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 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 8 of 39 23 February 2011 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||
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When we speak about grammar we tend to think about morphology, and if we ever continue to thinking about syntax it will be in terms of messy hierarchies of obscure rules - and everything has Latin names. Learning grammar then will be learning complete tables or rules that resemble juridical texts. I can understand if this seems less attraktive, but it doesn't have to be like that.
My personal preference is to run quickly through the grammar of a language at an early stage "to see what is there". However after that stage I mainly take two approaches: studying isolated examples through concrete examples and making my own summaries, which in the case of morphology results in "green sheets" which I use for reference. If you for instance want to study the use of ablative on Latin then check the possible endings and then go through a page or two of Latin text (preferably something fairly simple). Note down all passages where there seems to be a possible ablative and in if in doubt check with your grammar whether it should be an ablative and not for instance a dative, which often has the same form. Ask yourself whether you understand why there is an ablative in each and every case, using your grammar as a reference book rather as something to be learnt by heart. There are of course constructions in your grammar which aren't represented in any given text, but it is valuable to get a feel for which things are common and which are rare - and just looking things up to solve concrete problem cases will make it much easier to remember the different possibilities you have to choose from. It should also be clear why reading through your grammars before venturing into the 'real' world is a good idea: it makes it much easier to find things later when you look up a concrete construction or form. Morphology can often be analyzed in structural terms, maybe even as combinatorical games or geometry. The things Cainntear mentioned for Scottish Gaelic are also valid in Irish, and there I have noticed that the distribution of certain changes of initial consonants (lenition) is complementary between masculine and feminine words. Seeing such a pattern is part of understanding what is actually going on beneath the surface. And memorizing a simple geometric pattern instead of a lot of forms may be easier for some learners. The big problem is in my view all the things that have to memorized word for word, not those that have some kind of regularity. The morphology of a language is more or less those things that are regular enough to be put into tables - actually you should be happy that some things are that regular and start worrying about the things that are too confused for that treatment. Speaking like Tarzan is easy in a morphology-low language, but only because you don't notice all your blunders. Which brings me back to the Krashen problem. I wonder what kind in general of grammar study he and his followers actually are thinking about when they are so much against grammar. If it's all rote learning for them then their attitude may be understandable, but even then it would be more constructive to find ways to work with the regularities in our languages than just giving up and let people find their own way through the fog. Edited by Iversen on 23 February 2011 at 1:51am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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