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Krashen & some failures for Massive Input

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emk
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 Message 33 of 67
28 October 2014 at 1:34pm | IP Logged 
patrickwilken wrote:
I definitely have it easier learning this grammar now, now that I have a strong intuitive sense of the language, then I would have earlier on.

patrickwilken wrote:
But despite this my brain never once picked-up what the 'e' in Volk was doing, but reading this once in a grammar book was enough to make burn the rule into my brain.

I've had very similar experiences, and I've written about them in my log. But to summarize my conclusions:

1. Getting lots of input makes grammar much easier to learn.
2. Studying grammar makes details "pop out" of input, making them much easier to acquire.

I would expect rapid results in your case: You're building on a deep, intuitive knowledge of German, and you're continuing to get large amounts of input.

Note that similar phenomena exist with children: Some French kids struggle with gender at an age when their peers are doing fine. And just like in the US, there are speech therapists who arrive with games like Bon genre, bon nombre, and provide the kids with lots of concrete examples of how things work. I've witnessed a very good speech therapist working, and her resemblance to my DELF B2 tutor was striking. Apparently, there's less difference than you might expect between a good, upper-level tutor and a speech therapist.

s_allard wrote:
It is true that children learn languages naturally by massive input. But we sometimes forget that right from the
beginning children get massive correction of output in addition to massive input and massive interaction with
other children. All three phenomena go hand in hand. And in many countries, children enter some kind of
structured learning environment by the age of 5 or 6.

As far as I can tell, the amount of correction received by children varies hugely. Even within my own family, we tend to correct one of our kids but not the other. I've also witnessed big differences in "fossilized" errors between different native kids—some 3-year-olds seem to consistently latch on to certain errors for months at a time. Others don't.

I'd also expect that you'd see more correction in Quebec, where there's an existing colloquial register that's falling out of fashion. This isn't a necessarily a weakness in natural language acquisition—it's more a case making sure kids acquire a higher-prestige sociolect than they would otherwise. I saw much the same thing growing up in coastal Maine: The vast majority of corrections aimed at school-age kids were intended to stomp out American Vernacular English and the bizarre use of "r" in the Maine accent.
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Ari
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 Message 34 of 67
28 October 2014 at 2:03pm | IP Logged 
In many cultures the world over, adults don't talk to children until they can hold up
their end of the conversation. This does not seem to affect their acquisition of correct
language. I'm strongly suspicious of any theory that assumes that correction plays any
important role in children's language acquisition.

The whole "learn like a child" mantra is still fundamentally flawed, however, since we
are not children and our brains do not work the same way. Children are not small adults
and their brains are wired in a different way. A child learns language easier than an
adult, and an adult can appreciate an avocado easier than a child. No amount of "eating
like an adult" will change the fact that the child cannot integrate sensory information
and thus will not like complex flavors.
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s_allard
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 Message 35 of 67
28 October 2014 at 3:18pm | IP Logged 
Ari wrote:
In many cultures the world over, adults don't talk to children until they can hold up
their end of the conversation. This does not seem to affect their acquisition of correct
language. I'm strongly suspicious of any theory that assumes that correction plays any
important role in children's language acquisition.

The whole "learn like a child" mantra is still fundamentally flawed, however, since we
are not children and our brains do not work the same way. Children are not small adults
and their brains are wired in a different way. A child learns language easier than an
adult, and an adult can appreciate an avocado easier than a child. No amount of "eating
like an adult" will change the fact that the child cannot integrate sensory information
and thus will not like complex flavors.

I'm really curious to learn more about these many cultures where adults don't talk to children until these children
can converse. Does this mean that mothers, and even fathers, or caregivers don't talk to their children for the
first five years? If the parents don't talk to the children, how do the children learn to speak in the first place? I've
always thought that the expression mother tongue came from the fact that most children learn their language
from the mother.

As for the role of correction in language acquisition in children, I'll be the first to acknowledge that children go
through all kinds of learning stages that we must respect as they begin to master the intricacies of a language.
But, as can attest anyone who has had children or has worked with children, there is constant correction that is,
of course, often subtle and implicit. What do kindergarten or elementary school teachers do?
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Bao
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 Message 36 of 67
28 October 2014 at 3:50pm | IP Logged 
eyðimörk wrote:
I see no difference whatsoever between prescriptive grammar learned by natives and prescriptive grammar learned by non-natives.

I would rather think that when the vast majority of adult native speakers naturally use a feature of their language in a certain way, defining that feature as grammatical is not prescriptivist.

And learners/non-native speakers are not the same as native speakers. There is a qualitative difference to second language acquisition which is not only due to age, time invested and social environment, but inherent to the adult learner already being fully functional in one or more other languages.
Of course adult learners need the same kind of prescriptive rules as native speakers to reach a similar standard of literacy. But my point is that even with massive input, learners will probably benefit from also learning descriptive as well as prescriptive rules, and they might struggle with some features of the language without such rules or other strategies to help them.

Edited by Bao on 28 October 2014 at 3:53pm

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Iversen
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 Message 37 of 67
28 October 2014 at 4:44pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
How to survive grammar - revisited:
It will take an inordinate amount of time and input to extract complex rules about grammar from extensive input, but the expenditure will become much less if you already have the basic distinctions and some islands of knowledge ready. ...

s_allard wrote:
The fundamental hypothesis of massive input is that with time and exposure to the target language, the learner will spontaneously internalize all the necessary linguistic rules to produce correct output. I call this reverse
engineering the language.


I call it optimism
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chiara-sai
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 Message 38 of 67
28 October 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged 
s_allard wrote:

I'm really curious to learn more about these many cultures where adults don't talk to children until these children
can converse. Does this mean that mothers, and even fathers, or caregivers don't talk to their children for the
first five years? If the parents don't talk to the children, how do the children learn to speak in the first place? I've
always thought that the expression mother tongue came from the fact that most children learn their language
from the mother.


If I recall correctly, we’re talking about tribal peoples, so the children learn to speak via exposure to and interaction
with the rest of the tribe; they’re not gonna spend long periods of time alone with their parents like urban children do.
I don’t think whoever invented the expression mother tongue conducted scientific studies to decide what word to
use, they were probably just following a hunch.
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Iversen
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 Message 39 of 67
29 October 2014 at 6:41am | IP Logged 
I have seen the claim about parents not speaking directly to their children in connection with tribes in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania). But somehow those kids must catch a bit of simplified and stereotype language from their surroundings, otherwise I can't see how they can deduce the rules of the language they are supposed to learn.

If you planted a child in front of a babbling TV set and didn't speak directly to it before it could answer in complete sentences, how long would you have to wait?


Edited by Iversen on 29 October 2014 at 6:41am

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Ari
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 Message 40 of 67
29 October 2014 at 8:14am | IP Logged 
s_allard wrote:
I'm really curious to learn more about these many cultures where
adults don't talk to children until these children can converse. Does this mean that
mothers, and even fathers, or caregivers don't talk to their children for the
first five years? If the parents don't talk to the children, how do the children
learn to speak in the first place?


Children don't learn language from their parents, they learn it from their peers.
Children growing up in an area different from the one their parents grew up in seldom
acquire the accent of their parents.

"The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker has some information about this, in the chapter
about children, though I'm sure there are books that cover it in more depth. One of
the more surprising findings of behavioral psychology has been that what parents do
has little to no influence on children's language, behavior or intelligence.


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