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Learning by high level input | ||
Tags: Comprehensive input | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 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 25 of 32 15 February 2015 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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The question is whether it's as incomprehensible as Japanese. I've heard that nowadays Scandinavian kids start understanding English before they even go to school. I think the prestige/importance matters far more than the formal schooling part. And the constant presence that you don't even need to seek, unlike anime fans or input enthusiasts. It's literally easier for Scandinavians to learn English than to avoid it.
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| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4331 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 26 of 32 15 February 2015 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Purely because of input or because of English "teaching" in pre-school? This sort of playful education seems to get more and more common. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3909 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 27 of 32 15 February 2015 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The first time I had a conversation with a native English-speaker in English (the summer I turned nine), I had not had a single official or unofficial introduction to the English language at school, and definitely not pre-school. What I did have was hours upon hours upon hours daily of English input, ranging from programming for very small children to adults. We had a satellite dish, you see, and I was up early every morning. By age six I was finally reading fast enough to somewhat keep up with subtitles of more difficult shows (Zorro, Batman & Robin, MacGyver), which improved my understanding significantly. If you ask my parents, they pretty much just realised one day that I spoke English. That's a huge exaggeration, of course, because fluency was still a long way away, but I achieved "conversational" English from input alone by age 9. Mind you, I used to lie at school about how much television I watched because the other children watched half as much as I did (I easily averaged 5 hours of English input per day from television alone in primary school). 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 32 16 February 2015 at 2:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I know we've had much of this debate before but I think certain things are worth repeating. I don't think the fundamental argument is between, on the one hand, formal methods, i.e. classroom, textbooks and, on the other hand, communicative methods such as no classes, no textbooks and just talking and watching movies, etc. But before we look at this issue, let's step back a bit and observe how nearly all people achieve high levels of proficiency in foreign languages. It is inevitably some combination of: 1. Start young, the earlier the better. 2. Live in the country of the language. 3. Study and/or work in the language. 4. Have a significant emotional relationship with a speaker of the target language. Here is a typical example that I see every day where I work: an Asian student - Korean, Chinese, Singaporean - attends an English-speaking private school in Canada, makes lots of Canadian friends and ends up speaking impeccable English. Similarly, all the people that I've ever met who had great foreign language skills had lived in some sort of immersion environment. It all boils down to massive exposure, preferably at a young age. We talk a lot about the excellent English-language skills of the Scandinavians and the Dutch. There is a reason for this, as was discussed a lot. It should come to no surprise that tiny countries with large emigrant communities abroad, considerable tourism, languages that are rarely studied abroad, and a long history of international trade would have show high levels of foreign language proficiency. I would also add that from my own observation during two trips to Norway, the level of English proficiency varies considerably according to the exposure to and need for it. I do not think that all Norwegians are perfectly bilingual. By the same token, in large countries where few people have a real daily need for a second language and few opportunities to practice the language, it should not be surprising that levels of multilingualism are very low. Where I live, there are high levels of English-French bilingualism in the French-speaking province of Quebec and every low levels elsewhere except for French-speakers who must know English. Although everybody agrees that knowing a foreign language is a desirable thing, how many Britons, Americans, Australians, Japanese, Spaniards, Italians, etc. actually are comfortable speaking a foreign language? Of course, there are people in all these countries who need foreign- language skills. What does this have to do with the discussion of formal methods versus "communicative" methods? It's all a question of the learning environment. Most of the time when we refer to formal methods, we refer to a high school environment where the students have no real need for the language and very little contact with the language. The language class is a subject just like any other. The language is not really taught for the purpose of speaking. Contrast this with teaching of adults for the purpose of speaking, as one will find in language schools and even in universities. Just today I met a young woman from Brazil who is doing a Master's degree in French in her country and came to Montreal for a month just to practice her French. There is no conflict between formal methods and so-called communicative methods. The conflict is more in the purpose of language instruction. I'm sure that in many school systems, the goal is not really to produce speakers but more to pass exams. But if the objective is to produce proficient adult speakers, then formal methods such as textbooks will be combined with all the communicative stuff. This is exactly what we do here in Quebec when he have to train large numbers of immigrants to be able to use French in the workplace. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4869 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 29 of 32 16 February 2015 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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For the Scandinavians: How would you describe your relationship to English growing up?
Did you think from an early age that learning to understand English was just something unremarkable that most people would naturally do, like learning to read or swim or ride a bike? Did you feel pressure from parents, teachers, or others to master English because not doing so would mark you as uneducated and hurt your future prospects? Among your peers, was it "cool" to be good at English? Among your peers, were English classes at school considered to be enjoyable, annoying but understood to be useful, or just annoying? I would guess that it's not one or a few things that Scandinavians do differently, but rather a whole set of attitudes toward questions such as these, plus an overall greater amount of input, that distinguish Scandinavians from countries with less English proficiency. Certainly most Americans would not think of learning a foreign language as something natural and expected, and that includes those who study one at school. As children, Americans are exposed to "role models" of people who say things like "Oh yeah, I took Spanish in school, but I forgot it all. I wish I knew Spanish, though." As if learning Spanish were something that would just happen to a lucky few with a mythical talent!* *My own situation cannot be compared to people who grow up in that environment. My own family is super multilingual. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4517 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 30 of 32 16 February 2015 at 3:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
It's the same in the Netherlands. I can't speak for myself, as I spent 3 of my formative years abroad immersed, but I can speak for my brother who wasn't old enough to speak when we returned home from that sojourn. In our house it was very common at the time that at certain hours of the day we would have English cartoons dubbed in Dutch (we would watch those), and we got a lot (and I mean a lot) of computer games which were all in English. By age 9, my brother hadn't taken a single English class at school but understood buttloads, a lot more than my parents expected at the time. He was a bit shy to speak it, but he understood just fine. And when he started doing English classes he says he just sat there nonplussed wondering why everybody else thought it was hard - because he was simply used to the language. He, unlike me, didn't go to English speaking preschools. It's just that my parents brought home lots of English-language stuff for me that he eventually ended up playing with and learning from as well. And then after that he had a massive advantage, and to this day his English is very good. I've noticed particularly that amongst gamers or people who use the internet very frequently, English levels tend to be extremely high. Some of my friends who didn't really take many English classes are excellent English speakers because it's something they do every day. They will know obscure vocabulary that most English people have forgotten about because it cropped up in some fantasy game somewhere. I think it's also a societal attitude in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, yes. That definitely plays a role Edited by tarvos on 16 February 2015 at 12:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3909 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 31 of 32 16 February 2015 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I didn't think about it much. English was simply the medium for reading cool fiction, learning about the occult, reading pop-psychology about past lives, playing computer games, reading about your favourite Disney move online, etc. Knowing some English once made me pretty popular in second grade, for about a week. Then I went back into obscurity. Being several years ahead of my peers at every grade level, once we actually started learning English at school, though, English was always something that made me "special", which I suppose was partly a motivator to stay ahead.
I didn't think about it. Every single grown-up around me knew English, regardless of age, which made it pretty unremarkable, I guess, but I doubt I even once thought about the learning process, unlike riding a bicycle.
No, but I was always many years ahead. I was aware, of course, that without a passing grade in English you were not eligible to enter the Swedish equivalent of high school. If anything, I was made aware quite early on what great prospects I had having reached advanced fluency at a young age. By age 14 I had decided where in the UK I was going to university and chose an anglophone high school for the purpose of being eligible without jumping through extra hoops.
At a young age, yes, but not "cool" enough to make someone who wasn't "cool" much cooler.
School was thought to be annoying in general. We did not discuss the usefulness of English or the classes themselves beyond our impression of the teacher. If you had an awesome English teacher, the class was considered enjoyable. If you had a boring teacher, the class was considered boring. Teenagers, in my experience, think less about the subject matter than how they view the experience through a social lens. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6392 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 32 of 32 16 February 2015 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
It was a natural part of my environment and I was often exposed to it. My relationship with it was not quite like a second native language, more like as though English had been the national language and Swedish the regional language.
Pretty much, yeah.
Not really. I never struggled to learn English or learned it in school. We had English lessons, of course, but I mostly knew all the stuff except for the formal grammar, but I already had the intuitive grasp. However, I had a significantly better grasp of English than my peers, though I didn't quite realize this until years later.
Not really. It was sort of assumed people could speak it and we'd sometimes throw in English words into the conversation. As we grew older, the phenomenon of using an English word because we couldn't remember the Swedish word grew more common, but it was never something used to impress people. Throughout my life, English knowledge has always been assumed. Nobody's ever asked me how good my English is. It's assumed that a Swedish young adult can speak English comfortably, though not necessarily perfectly.
As all classes, mostly boring. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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