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Input is necessary but not sufficient. | ||
Tags: Comprehensive input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 36 23 December 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I get the impression that the opposition is not input (passive) vs output (active) but informal learning
vs formal study. Informal learning is made up of both passive and active components. Formal study tends to be very passive. I don't think anybody believes that just listening to thousands of hours of comprehensible input automatically makes you into a great speaker. The same goes for reading and writing. Massive reading helps but does not turn you into a good writer. What input does is provide you with the linguistic resources to then produce output. Actual production depends on a number of other factors. Good corrective feedback is very important for pronunciation and grammar particularly. Living and studying in the language is probably the best thing one can do. Everyday activities such as going to the store become input/output learning activities. It's not surprising that true immersion is so effective. The big problem of most language learners like us is the lack of opportunities to use the language for real. We have to make do with input such as books, movies, internet and formal study. This is not usually very effective in terms of active skills such a writing and speaking. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4805 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 18 of 36 24 December 2014 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, you don't need anyone else for majority of the feedback. A key to exercises and
your ears can do large part of the work. Active skills can be immensely improved and even built from scratch just from self-teaching, especially thanks to the input such as books, movies etc. I dare say learning a language to high level was nearly impossible before internet with all those easily accessible input sources. Many people fail without teachers but many fail with them, many fail outside of the language's country and many fail while living in it. The commonly praised approach on htlal is not just a poor substitution for living in the country. It is a longer and tricky way which can, however, in the end function just as well. It is a huge compliment when natives ask for how long did I live in France but it is not that uncommon. I may not speak like a native but, obviously, my tv series, grammar books, fiction books and movies did just as good job as immersion does for many others. The root of the trouble, in my opinion, lies elsewhere. No formal/informal, active/passive etc. It is the pure laziness to leave your comfort zone. Thousands of hours of listening will help you immensely on your way to become a great speaker and if I was to bet on one learner 1:has listened to thousands of hours of input 2:has studied with a tutor, got lots of feedback, but doesn't listen much, I would always bet on the first one to speak better. The trouble with most people using input as their main "learning" method is that they've actually stopped learning. Vast majority of them these days are people with some basics of English gathered at school, who are now devouring the american tv series, playing computer games, listening to music in English and doing all this stuff that should be immensely helpful. But for some reason, it is not. Those people are stuck, their speaking or writing doesn't improve anymore. I think the trouble is not "lack of feedback" by someone else or anything like that. It is not that the activities they're doing are passive. What is trully passive is their approach. Those people have tons of input but they do not challenge themselves with more and more difficult kinds of input, they do just get through the content but do not use the opportunity to trully think in the language, to talk to themselves, actively study anything on the side and so on. They are not critical of themselves when occassionaly speaking or writing, they are content with their abilities no matter how far from perfection those happen to be. They are stuck. I am just one of the many exemples that you can get good pronunciation without getting feedback from someone else (my Berlin experience described in detail in one of my logs), hundreds of hours of input made me a very good speaker by themselves, I'm daily using words or even grammar I've only met in the fun input so far. And, from what I read in logs of others, I am not an exception, I am not a genious with a gift noone else got. Huge amount of input simply works, if you are not lazy, if you combine it with other things based on your needs, if you constantly strive for more and don't let your quite comfortable level stop you. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 19 of 36 24 December 2014 at 2:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Nobody disputes the value of lots of input. The more the better. That's pretty much a given. The
problem is the passage from input to output, actual speaking and writing. As has been pointed out, many people can do this entirely on their own. Whatever the techniques they use, they are able to produce excellent output without gradual interaction with native speakers. On the other hand, many people, and I dare say most, find speaking and writing very challenging despite massive amounts of input. The problem of course lies in the fact that input is essentially a passive activity in which grammar, context, sound, meaning, etc. are all provided to you. When producing output, you the speaker have to construct everything, preferably correctly. Very few people are able to start speaking a language perfectly just from hearing it. Most people make all kinds of mistakes that, hopefully, will be corrected. With time and correction, the mistakes disappear or diminish. At least, that's the idea. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way. Mistakes get fossilized. The accent becomes set. And the learner is often unaware of all this. The learner is convinced that they are speaking perfectly because nobody corrects them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4329 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 20 of 36 24 December 2014 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Introspection has a lot of problems, but since I've taken a pretty Input based approach to learning German (20k pages/700 films, with little formal grammar study) perhaps I can suggest ideas.
This is almost a tautology: The brain learns do what it is trained to do, but generally not more. When I read a text or watch a movie, what I am training my brain to do is extract meaning. The more I do of this the better my brain gets at doing what I am training it to do. I am quite confident that if I keep doing an Input-based approach I'll fairly quickly (in the next 1-3 years) reach something like C2 in German at a receptive level. However, Meaning DOES NOT always map cleanly onto Form - the most obvious case in IE languages being gender - and form is not always important for the extraction of meaning. Let's take the use of the genitive case to show possession: The house of my mother // The house of my son. Das Haus meiner Mutter // Das Haus meines Sohnes The differences in construction come down simply to the fact that in German Mutter is a feminine noun, and Sohn masculine. Now the following incorrect sentences don't sound terrible to me, perhaps a bit off, but not terribly: Das Haus meines Mutters // Das Haus meiner Sohn // Das Haus meiner Mutters // Das Haus meines Sohn But this sounds just bad: Das Haus mein Mutter // Das Haus mein Mutters // Das Haus mein Sohn // Das Haus mein Sohnes What I take from this is that my brain has learnt the rough rule, that to show possession using the genitive case the 'mein' needs to be modified with either an 'er' or 'es' ending (anything else would sound very odd), and that in certain cases an 's' is added to the possessive noun, but the link between the 'mein-er/es' and whether the possessive noun is modified remains relatively weak despite countless examples. I think the reason this rule remains weak is because my brain has not learnt to automatically see gender in nouns, since gender does not affect meaning, and what I have been doing is training my brain to extract meaning, not form. Now if gender was unambiguously marked in nouns (say by feminine nouns always ending in 'e') then perhaps I would have learnt the grammatical rule even if I only focused on meaning - but gender is not so clearly marked and so the rule, despite lots of exposure, has not been burnt so cleanly into my brain. It's not clear to me how picking up a grammar book (or getting a tutor) would necessarily help me. After all I know this rule, and for that matter it's obvious to me that what the genders of 'Mutter' and 'Sohn' are. What I lack at the moment is a gut-sense of gender within sentences - perhaps in a sense I am gender blind as this doesn't affect meaning - and what I need to do is somehow get my brain to somehow start focusing on gender at the input stage, perhaps by focusing on it at the output stage. Perhaps this will just become obvious with lots more input, perhaps not. I do know after all the distinction between who/whom in English without ever being taught it simply from exposure. My guess is though that a lot of this will become much clearer once I start producing output (particularly writing) that can then be corrected, and force me to focus on the form of sentences more clearly. Edited by patrickwilken on 24 December 2014 at 9:13am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7001 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 21 of 36 24 December 2014 at 6:52am | IP Logged | ||
I've found that my spelling has improved a great deal recently as the result of writing/testing that skill for about 60 hours over the last month. Your explanation for why makes sense. I've found myself paying more attention to spelling, even when I'm reading something I won't be tested on. Edited by luke on 24 December 2014 at 6:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4561 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 22 of 36 24 December 2014 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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When I started this thread, it was because I started out with unreasonable expectations for
input as a part time learner. Krashen advocated that input was the magic key. When I learned Samoan, I worked hard at reading and I had great success. The whole time I was in Samoa, I spoke Samoan most of the time. I think that massive input is vital for rapid language acquisition, I think you need to practice the language also. Recently I've been trying FSI basic Spanish after a couple of years of assimil, l-r, a and SRS. I've experienced a definite positve impact on my productive language. It seems to be working exactly as I hoped it would. Let me give an example. Spanish has two past tenses (at least). Either can usually be translated as the English past tense. For years I have known the forms and the "rule" for which to use. But when I listen or read, I can get the gist by treating them both as the same tense. The last three units of FSI have emphasized these tenses including drills on when to use which one. I have had a big breakthrough with my understanding of these tenses, including my comprehension. Reading narrative is much easier all of a sudden. All this from a couple of hours of audiolingual drills. There is a difference between knowing something vaguely so you can get the gist, and processing it automatically. This focus on form that FSI encourages seems to make the grammar more salient even when I am just reading or listening for meaning. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6393 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 23 of 36 24 December 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with Cavesa about the comfort zone. After all, Krashen advocates i+1 input. Not i+5 and not i+0. And I'll be surprised if his theory allows ignoring either reading or listening.
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| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4086 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 24 of 36 26 December 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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NOt everyone needs a teacher, and it must be emphasised that some are simply either
better or more intuitive and more comfomtble at self-teaching than others. I remember, similarly, that in addition to being completely self-teaching for all of my eight languages despite a few years in some of these languages in college (high school), I am advancing at least 10 times more quickly and with less difficulty than when I had formal instruction. Similarly, my old friend of almost 20 years, we were in a dilemma in secondary school when we wanted to skip formal instrution of calculus we were one year younger than when it was normal to take that class, we even offered to sit an exam to absolve us of taking a year of calculus and advancing to higher maths before university, the department rejected our prposal, so what we did was that we taught ourselves all of the calculus curriculum that was given, passed that exam that those in the class with a teacher took, even with better marks than most of those students, and everyone wondered how the hell we taught ourselves all of this material so easily, we responded, because we need no teacher. Sometimes a teacher does not suit a student if the learning style is different from the teaching style. It must also be accepted that some prefer to do things on their own without formal instruction, most likely excelling more than if they had formal instruction. I have been teaching myself Spanish for 8 years after a few years in secondary school, and someday maybe in a few years I plan to do the C2 exam, whether I hire a tutour or not I know not, but given that that is simply expensive, maybe I might do an experiment and sit C2 with no tutour. If that is what happens, I can post what the results are. But the point is that I am comfortable teaching myself things, using my own methods, whether others reject them even formal instructors is immaterial to me. I do a lot of input, but as Cavesa, I talk to myself in Spanish, I think in Spanish literally everyday (and right now actually I am thinking in Spanish, except ironically thinking in Spanish to translate thereafter to type in English, my native language). It may seem like a looney thing to do, but if no one is in the house, I speak a lot to myself in Spanish with Spanish television or some video playing. In university, I take notes in Spanish instead of English. The reminder notes that I write and put on my desk are all in Spanish. My phone is in Spanish, and the browser wherewith I type this message are all in Spanish, as well as I changed my entire Windows interface into Spanish. This is just one example, since Spanish is my strongest foreign language, but I can easily do these things with my other 7 target languages, without formal instruction, and purely on massive input. Also speaking with myself and having little opportunity to speak regularly any of these languages, at least with my strongest one, Spanish, at any point, I can simply start speak spontaneously in any situation that enfronts me, if I had to, because I essentially live in a constructed environment that is conducive to input-learning. But if I had to travel to Barcelona, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Santiago, whither be it, I can break out in Spanish immediately from all of the input, something that I have already done numerous times like Cavesa in Berlin. The "new" environment is no shock to me--I have already "been" there at home. Edited by 1e4e6 on 26 December 2014 at 9:16pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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