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Krashen and beginners | ||
Tags: Natural method | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4512 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 33 of 39 17 January 2012 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry for necroing this thread, but I'd like to add to it..
Let's assume the pupil gets "Hand" and "Kopf", how is he gonna get the preposition "auf"? Well, you could show more "auf" examples. The pupil got "Kopf" already, and pointing on it while saying "Dies ist ein Kopf", then pointing on the hand and saying "Dies ist eine Hand" will introduce "Dies ist.." as "This is..". Easy enough, right? Now you point on a book: "Dies ist ein Buch", then a table: "Dies ist ein Tisch". You then return to "Die Hand ist AUF dem Kopf", stressing the "auf". After that, "Das Buch ist AUF dem Tisch". And so on. Don't be so uncreative, folks. Also, learning words isn't fun? I got news for you: Languages are composed of words. Surprising, isn't it? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vytenis Newbie Lithuania Joined 4618 days ago 8 posts - 16 votes | Message 34 of 39 17 January 2012 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that there is a need of some help in the beginner stages, before a learner can start "learning language from language itself" i.e. using language as a raw material for study. However, even Krashen does not deny the importance of language classes for complete beginners. He does emphasize in many places that classes could be a good headstart for a beginner. Classes are useful inasmuch as they can prepare a learner to understand the input and get on their own independent feet so to speak. Krashen himself said on a few occasions "if I go to Mexico without speaking a word of Spanish, all the input I get there wouldn't help me much. However, if before going to Mexico I attend some classes which would give me the basics and prepare me to understand the input I will get in Mexico (even if I may not understand everyting I will hear there), then the classes would be extremely useful and it would be foolish to reject them". (this quote is not his exact words, but the general idea) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 35 of 39 18 January 2012 at 12:05am | IP Logged | |||||
I think you have managed to both miss my point and confirm what I was saying in making that example. It is not that I am being 'uncreative' - it is that to communicate the grammatical point in Krashen's example on a very simple grammatical rule takes alot of, as you put it, 'And so on'...ad nauseum. It is not that it can't be done, and it has nothing to do with a failure to be creative, it is that it is an inefficient way of teaching these simple but important rules when compared to a method based on the formal explanation of rule and the learner producing examples to naturalise them - i.e. FSI, Michel Thomas, etc - the traditional method for teaching this kind of thing. Edited by Elexi on 18 January 2012 at 12:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4512 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 36 of 39 18 January 2012 at 1:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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The "and so on" means just that: it'll go on like this. From the way leading to "Das Buch ist auf dem Tisch" alone, a learner would have acquired:
- Hand (a noun) - Kopf (a noun) - Tisch (a noun) - Buch (a noun) - Dies ist (a grammar point) - ein (article, also grammar point) - eine (article, also grammar point) - auf (preposition, also grammar point) - an idea that there exist atleast two kinds of articles in the language - a vague sense of genders being there Not bad for such a short lesson, right? Don't underestimate people, this is what can be picked up, and they will atleast get an idea of all this, and after a while, it'll only get better. People will forget those words if they don't encounter them again, but they will, because if language lessons build up like this, repetition is unavoidable. You can, after you covered some area, explain the underlying concepts. This won't hurt the principle in any way. You acquired the "how to", now you'll get an explanation of the "why". If you did Pimsleur first, then Michel Thomas afterwards, this would exactly be the way it went, too. Only that with Pimsleur, you'd be forced to produce from the beginning and with Thomas, the explanations will not come in the same order as the lesson on the "how to" - because they're not linked. Now what does the standard text book course teach you? Guten Tag. Mein Name ist atamawarui. ...as set phrases ^^ 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5037 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 37 of 39 18 January 2012 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
And this is exactly what happened to you. Your classes, be it Russian or English, just prepared you for the real thing. You got Russian input and you didn't get English input on which to apply what you learned in class, so by the time you became proficient in Russian you weren't so in English. As simple as that. One of my pet peeves as language teaching extremisms go is how people equate 'communicative' stuff with 'learning' and thus disregard explicit teaching, which is in turn the most important part of it -- in the sense that it's the only one where a a teacher's presence is important because he can make things so much easier. Now, because you weren't given much to practice on in classes, you disregard what you were supposed to learn, and that's not fair. Communication in class is cool, yes, but how can you practice what you haven't been taught previously? Well, blindly and with great difficulty. Just how did you learn to dance? To solve equations? Whatever, really? Somebody explained to you how it was done, and you had to practice it until it stuck. Neither part suffices for successful learning alone. But what to teach explicitly in a class? Well, whatever enables students to get by as quick as possible, and I'm sorry but that obviously involves teaching whatever rules there are -- thus saving students the time it'd take them to work out the rules on their own. Of course, there isn't ONE way to do it, and teaching should be characterized by flexibility based on each class' needs. A balance must be found in both aspects: how much must be taught explicitly vs practice time, how much 'grammarians' stuff' must be taught. It's endlessly surprising to see so many people so willing to jump out the frying pan into the fire, twofold. Must be human nature... Edited by mrwarper on 18 January 2012 at 2:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 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 38 of 39 18 January 2012 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So basically you need three or four things to learn some grammatical issue: a rule (plus a list of exceptions), a lot of concise and comprehensible examples and the opportunity to experiment with the possibilities without being punished too harshly. And all three elements are necessary.
Krashen basically tries to hide the rule (as Cainntear wrote), and some teachers and text book systems try to force learners to produce examples based on the rules before they have seen enough examples, which makes it a game where you partly construct, partly guess without really having a clue what is right and what's not. The fundamental problem in teaching people grammatical rules is to do it in a way they understand. Which basically amounts to telling them to pulling themselves up by the bootstraps because they don't know grammatical terminology before they have learnt grammar, and it is difficult to teach them grammatical rules in a concise and precise way without using the good old timetested terminology. So they have to learn the dirty words alongside with the things those words are supposed to clarify. Which isn't easy, but it can be done. The good news is that once you have learnt the terminology it can be reused or at least used as a steppingstone, and - with the necessary adaptations and caveats - you can even use it across language borders. Edited by Iversen on 18 January 2012 at 2:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6754 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 39 of 39 18 January 2012 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Kato Lomb, a Hungarian polyglot from the days of the Iron Curtain, notes in her book that students who had received their foreign language instruction in magnet schools for languages tended to be far more proficient than students attending regular schools. This appears to have been the case in the Soviet Union as well, where there was certainly no access to any sort of "massive input" even in such schools. The conclusion one can draw from this is that formal instruction can be quite effective even without a lot of input. It may not be the best or the most fun way to learn, but it is a way to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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