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Research: months of no exposure | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4051 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 9 of 15 26 July 2014 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||
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It's a shame they didn't have a group of people who continued to be exposed to the language for comparison. It would be interesting to know if the main factor is simply the elapsing of time, or if continued exposure changes how quickly consolidation occurs.
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| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3653 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 10 of 15 26 July 2014 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
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There's quite and interesting (although brief) discussion of this topic
here, and I believe the same study is cited. I've never really had a long break from language study, but I have seen positive results from leaving a language untouched for a short while - from a fortnight to a month. I think the idea that a long break changes the way we process is quite interesting. Outside of language learning, I would say most of us see the advantages of breaks away from a subject. We have more distance from the subject (and any frustration we may have built up), and we are also more distant from our own initial thought processes. For example, it is best to leave a written text for at least a short while before editing. With this distance, it becomes easier to spot mistakes because we are not so familiar with our original text, nor are we so emotionally involved. We are better prepared to look at it with a critical eye. We've also given ourselves a chance to get out of any grooves or ruts that continual study/review may have gotten us in and - with any luck - may have encountered different methods in other parts of our life that help us sort out our problems. I think it makes sense that something similar applies to language learning. There have been times when, after a short break, I come back to a particular language and have a miniature 'eureka' moment: I understand something because I've seen it used in another one of my languages (including my L1), or because my brain has worked through its kinks and stresses, allowing me to look at my language with a fresh eye. EDIT to fix a link and exterminate an evil apostrophe. Maybe I'll come back in a week and see if I can catch more mistakes! Edited by Elenia on 26 July 2014 at 12:02pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5227 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 11 of 15 26 July 2014 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I really think that this is no big deal. The fundamental idea seems to be that during the learning process a break or
gap can have positive results in that the brain can consolidate what is learned. We return to the learning process and pick up where we left off with a feeling of renewed vigour. This is a major scientific breakthrough in language learning? How exactly does one apply this to learning a foreign language? For example, would you do something like 6 weeks of immersion at Middlebury College and then nothing for a month so that everything jells? Frankly, what I would do would be to head straight off to Quebec or France to use what I have learned while it's still fresh. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5105 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 12 of 15 26 July 2014 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't think so. I think they just need a proper research paper to make it official, to be able to say "it has been proven that xxx" next time. I don't think the paper is trying to say that "non exposure" is as good as or better than "continuing exposure/practising in Quebec", but instead, that "non exposure" doesn't necessarily cause deterioration. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4625 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 13 of 15 26 July 2014 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Outcast:: I don't think they were talking about fluency, but about retention,
i.e. how much people remembered after that long break. I actually think this line of thinking has something in common with Huliganov/David James's Goldlist, in which his basic premise is that you don't return to a headlist (usually 25 words or items), for at least 14 days. His logic is that after that time, if you remember a word or item then it's in your long-term memory, so you can discard it. He also says that remembering to the long-term memory is all done by the subconscious mind, and that conscious memorizing techniques will tend to put it in the short-term memory only. I think what the research paper I quoted shows (and I'm sorry you didn't think it deserved its own thread, @Michel1020, although you failed to explain why not), is that the students (whichever way they learned) remembered a certain amount of it with no further repetition, so it must have already been in their LT memories by the end of the study period. Put another way, you don't after all need constant repetition in order to remember something, if you got it the first time around. The trick is then, of course, to separate out what you don't know from what you do know, and only repeat the former. The Goldlist system tries to do that, and I am sure there are other ways of achieving it as well. Some people found the paper depressing. What I find depressing is that people here actually enjoy "Britain's Got Talent"! - Just kidding - watch whatever you like. Personally I watch two Welsh soaps (one northern, the other southern) and they are da iawn. @S_allard: Yes, I too would want to go off to France or Quebec, or wherever to play with my newly-learned skill, and this is why I went on a total immersion Welsh Bootcamp in April. But most of us can't stay in our TL countries forever, so what happens when we get home? Well, we keep practicing I guess, but if for whatever reason, we can't continue working on the language, at least for a time, do we necessarly lose it? We might have thought so, but perhaps we don't, after all. Edited by montmorency on 26 July 2014 at 5:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5227 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 14 of 15 26 July 2014 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I may be dimwitted, but I just don't
seem to get the significance of the paper, at least with reference to foreign language learning. If you learned something - let's say vocabulary - and you don't use it for a while, do you lose it? Well, it depends basically on two things: a) how well you learned the vocabulary in the first place and b) the length of non-use. What most of us observe is that if you've learned a language relatively well and for some reason we don't use it for a while, then it takes a relatively short time of use or immersion for "it to come back." The key thing is "know well." I have know doubt that if you achieved something like a B2 or a C1 in a language and not use it for a year or two and then suddenly find yourself in a situation, you might struggle a bit in the beginning but it will come back quite quickly. A key point here is the difference between core components of the language, usually grammar and pronunciation, and more peripheral items like vocabulary. We will tend to forget the more peripheral things but the core components will remain intact. Edited by s_allard on 26 July 2014 at 9:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4318 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 15 of 15 26 July 2014 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some thoughts:
1. this is mainly about syntax, not so much about semantics/vocabulary 2. it doesn't say anything about how languages with low proficiency are affected (so you are a C2 in English and have no exposure to it for 6 months ... and you still know English syntax, surprise, surprise) 3. what it does say is that long-term effects may be different from short-time effects and that ERP effects might be different from behavioral effect (the d' scores are practically identical between explicit and implicit learning, look at the error bars, and between end-of-learning test and after 5 months, but the ERPs are different) So if you are highly proficient in an L2, you won't lose your grammar knowledge for some time, no matter whether you acquired it explicitly or implicitly. But the consolidation seems to be different for explicitly and implicitly learned syntax rules, leading to different brain waves. Does the latter have any practical relevance? We don't know. And the "more native-like" part: we learned our L1 implicitly, so that the brain waves for implicitly learned L2 are closer to L1 waves than those of explicitly learned L2 are, doesn't necessarily mean that implicit learning is better. It just means that implicit and explicit learning lead to different neuronal responses, the practical outcome might be the same. Many roads lead to Rome... Edited by daegga on 26 July 2014 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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