|
|
Close Help | ||||||||||||||
I'm also a teacher. I've encountered a number of teaching methodologies in my few years of teaching, and thus have some practical experience with the benefits and downsides of various techniques. Naturally I'm interested in ways to help my students learn more efficiently too.
My first two and a half years studying Japanese were not stellar. I studied diligently for a few weeks and then my motivation dropped off. After a few months of avoiding study, the cycle would repeat. Then one day I discovered spaced repetition. I found it so effective that I started improving the spaced repetition system (SRS) I was using, and eventually started writing my own.
Of particular interest is the article about correctly formatting input.
Supermemo also codified some important distinctions between active recall and passive review in the context of an SRS:
active recall - the process in which pieces of information are actively retrieved from memory as opposed to passive review. For example, in passive review one might read that the highest divorce rate occurs in the 4th year of marriage. In active recall, you would have to retrieve this information from your memory: In which year of marriage are couples most likely to divorce? If you answer correctly, "4th year", then your memory stability will increase and so will the probability of recall in the future. In passive review, this increase is dramatically less pronounced.passive review - the process in which pieces of information are read passively without asking questions (as opposed to active recall). For example, in passive review one might read that 50% of marriages in the US divorce. In active recall, you would have to retrieve this information from your memory: What proportion of marriages in the US divorce? Active recall is far more effective in learning than passive review.
Krashen posits that people have two types of language knowledge: learned knowledge, such as grammar rules we pick up from a textbook, and acquired knowledge, which we get from natural exposure to the language (talking to a native speaker, watching TV, etc). He suggests that fluency is a product of our acquired knowledge, not our learned knowledge.
Krashen believes that subconscious language acquisition is far more important than conscious learned knowledge. However, he also talks about the merits of academic knowledge of the language, and describes how the most effective speakers are those who can strike a balance between their acquired and learned knowledge. Without the balance, speakers either worry too much about the structure of what they are saying, or don't worry about it enough, and produce material full of mistakes. I have seen examples of both extremes in my own teaching.
Another part of the Monitor Model is the input hypothesis. It states that for input language to be useful, it should be one "step" above the learner's current level. If the learner's current level is L, then the optimum input language is L+1. Language that is too easy doesn't result in the learner learning anything new, and language which is too hard is frustrating.
They concluded that if less than 98% of the material in a passage is not known, it is generally not possible to intuit the meaning of the unknown words.
This means that diving into real material well above your level is not an effective way of picking up new material. Learning by osmosis only works when you understand most of the material already.
That is not to say that real material should be discarded completely - with a dictionary it can be broken down and analyzed. But a lot of time is required to do so, and chances are you won't be able to guess at the meaning of any words - every unknown word will require consulting a dictionary.
Paul Nation and Karen Wang Ming-tzu released another paper in 1999 entitled Graded readers and vocabulary. They concluded, among other things, that a certain level of reading is required for new words to be repeated enough to stick in memory.
Ungraded material, which contains a mix of common and uncommon words, is very unlikely to help you memorize the more uncommon words without outside help.
The problem with immersive learning is that it is not pragmatic. Someone committed to immersive learning avoids using their native tongue even when it would be more productive or efficient.
Immersive learning is common in the teaching of children at eikaiwa schools in Japan. The parents pay a lot of money in the hope that a 100% English classroom will allow the child to learn by osmosis. Unfortunately at the usual rate of 30-60 minutes a week, this is often counterproductive. Non-trivial phrases are often not understood by the children, or misunderstood. It's not that uncommon for children to parrot structures without having any idea what they mean, or assume they mean something they do not.
Immersive learning is much more effective in large doses. Children who spend 25+ hours a week at a foreign-language preschool can rapidly improve. However, until they reach the ability to describe, and understand the description of words, they will be unable to say some things that they want to.
This avoidance of one's native tongue extends into adult study, too. Many teachers make students use an monolingual dictionary. For an intermediate English student, something like the excellent Collins Cobuild dictionary may provide adequate explanations some of the time. But until the student has enough base knowledge to understand the majority of the definition, sometimes a definition raises more questions than it answers.
The popularity of the immersion method has led to the irrational belief that one's native tongue will somehow spoil one's understanding of a foreign language. I can see where this comes from: many people have a tendency to assume that a foreign language acts like their native one, and by doing away with one's native language, such mistakes can be avoided. But unconditionally avoiding one's native tongue is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A director of the language media school at the University of California, Mark Kaiser, had some particularly scathing things to say about the software:
The entire package lacks any pedagogical foundation. Rather, it utilizes the glitz of the multimedia capabilities of the computer, a dearth of quality foreign language software, and clever marketing to create an economically successful product.
However, if corrections are available, this can be a very motivating way to learn. Mistakes in our own output usually hold personal relevance - they are something we wanted to say! If the mistakes are few and far between, verbal correction may be sufficient, but for more frequent errors, one really needs to see the mistake written down on paper (and correct versions can then be practiced in an SRS in the future).
Q: a small, furry domesticated animal A: a catThe answer side may also include an optional example sentence, like "I prefer cats to dogs".
As they rightly point out in their new materials, this is not the best way to study. The definitions are copied from dictionary entries, not their own language, and thus the definitions may sometimes be unclear (the above answer could be "a rabbit" as well). But the method has one positive element: the answer requires one to produce the answer, not just read it.
However, the antimoon folk suggest putting a native sentence in the question field. In the answer field, they suggest putting definitions of difficult words, notes, or nothing at all. A card might look like:
Q: I met her at the station yesterday A:This turns reviews into a passive exercise, which is a terrible way to learn if you want to improve your ability to produce, and not just absorb material. Subtle points like the verb tense (meet vs met), preposition (at vs on) and so on are often glimpsed over when we read quickly. By simply looking at the above sentence, it will be very difficult to produce a similar sentence yourself, as the smaller details don't stand out.
The antimoon people acknowledge this, and have designed a "system" to cope with it, called pause and think. It can be summed up as "be careful". From the above page:
If the sentence contains a useful phrase, ask yourself: Could you produce a similar phrase yourself? Would you use the right tenses, articles and prepositions? Would you use the right word order? If you're not sure, practice saying a similar phrase aloud or in your mind. The idea is to move the phrase to your "active vocabulary".In the above system, we are presented with a sentence, asked to look at it carefully, and then perhaps repeat it without looking. This is better than nothing - studies have shown that the mere act of attempting to repeat a sentence without looking at it can double the strength of our memory. But basically such questioning trains our ability to recognize phrases, not use them. Some expressions may enter our active vocabulary by chance, but with such a small interval between seeing a sentence and repeating it, the chances of it achieving long term active recall are much smaller than they could be.
So why not put the sentence in the answer, and test your ability to use all the correct parts of speech?
There are many ways to make active recall questions. Some examples (for a person studying Japanese) are:
Q: he went to the station A: (彼は)駅に行ったor
Q: he, station, went A: (彼は)駅に行ったor even
Q: 駅、行く (過去形） A: 駅に行ったIt doesn't really matter what format the question is in, as long as it serves to remind you of the answer sentence in question. So you're free to avoid your native tongue if you can communicate the idea in the target language - though in practice one's native tongue can often prove faster.
Some argue that there are many different ways to say a given phrase and thus it's difficult to remember the correct way. In practice, I find this to be untrue. On the rare occasions where the question is not sufficient to produce the answer, either you don't understand the word well enough (and thus should look up more example sentences), or the prompt in the question is not clear enough. Such unclear prompts are usually easy to detect after one or two reviews, and are easily changed to something clearer.
Aside from the much stronger memory connections caused by active recall, it also requires the person studying to clearly distinguish similar words in their deck. This can be done by including extra context in the question, like so:
Q: this way A: こちら Q: this way (casual) A: こっちFor simple items like the above, where there are no more than two alternatives, it can sometimes be more efficient to merge the two Japanese words into the one card (provided you understand the difference between them).
Or it can be done by picking example sentences which explicitly show the differences between similar-sounding words:
Q: my cold got better A: 風邪が治った Q: the power is back up A: 停電が直ったIn the above example, the same-sounding word naoru has different kanji depending on the context. Similar techniques can be applied to completely different words that have similar meanings.
Thinking about appropriate questions to produce the answer can sometimes be difficult, but it results in both a better understanding of the word or phrase in question, and ensures you will be able to produce it in the future, instead of just recognize it. For this reason, active recall is much better than passive review.
How do you say "thank you"?or
A friend gives you a gift. What do you say?or
You speak to your boss. They suggest you take a few days off work, as you look tired. You appreciate the offer, and accept. How do you show your appreciation?The point of questions like this is not direct translation from one language to another. The native language is merely used as a tool in order to elicit the target language.
And for those that argue "there are many ways to express your appreciation!", while this is true, the answer is usually obvious from the context of the course. If you are creating your own material, the question and the answer will often be tied together in your mind.
Many English speakers try to learn an English-centered Japanese. Many Japanese speakers try to learn a Japanese-centered English. I have had this desire myself–you want to use that word you have in your language in that other language, right? Guess what? It won’t work. The target language has its own way of expressing meaning and feeling; quite often, it may not even have a word equivalent to the word you are wanting to express. The immersion environment can help you let go of that desire to force your base language’s patterns onto your target language, by constantly showing you how the target language is really used.It's good advice on its own, but it is used as a justification for avoiding one's native language at all times, or is at least taken that way by many people reading his site. It also prevents questioning techniques like in Pimsleur.
No, no, no, no, no. Never translate a sentence. Either use someone else’s translation (i.e. a bilingual dictionary) or simply understand it without a translation (monolingual dictionary). You want to be moving away from this idea of translating into the language you want to learn–it will hurt your progress; it will harm your grammar; it will slow you down.Some quite sweeping statements here, with no evidence provided to back them up. If you encounter a sentence with one unknown word, you look that word up in the dictionary and thus have a good idea what the sentence means, what is the harm in translating it to your native language? I'm left guessing as to how it could possibly "harm your grammar". By that logic, people working as translators would rapidly become unable to speak!
Q: But how will I learn to speak the language if I don’t memorize phrases?Here Khatzumoto seems to even be eschewing Antimoon's "pause and think" philosophy, suggesting that everything will happen automatically if you just expose yourself enough.
A: No, no, no, no, no. I mean…You just will. It’s called the Input Hypothesis. Really, it should be called the Input Fact. If you keep reading and listening to a language on a constant basis, your ability to speak and write it will develop quite naturally.
The input hypothesis has been shown to increase fluency, but not so much accuracy. This means reading large amounts of input material will improve your general knowledge and communication abilities, but it has no guarantees as to accuracy. An analytical person who is prone to "pausing and thinking" when they see sentences may have as much as 50% of the material they are reviewing enter their active vocabulary. But people who are not analytical may find their success far smaller.
No, no, no, no, no. No. Understand sentences, practice understanding and reading them out loud with your SRS. Do not memorize them in terms of learning to say them by heart; it is too slow and too failure prone.And
Do not memorize the sentences. That’s too complex and too failure-prone. If you’re like me, you can barely memorize words, let alone sentences.From what I can see, Khatzumoto doesn't offer any explanations as to why it's too "complex" or "failure-prone", but perhaps he's referring to the fact it's a bit harder to write suitable cues for similar-sounding sentences. I have been using active recall study methods for about a year, and the difficulty in making cues for similar cards has been far outweighed by the ease at which I can recall sentences after a few practices.
As Khatzumoto is a big advocate of SRSs, I find it strange that he advocates passive recognition despite all the evidence showing how ineffective it is in comparison to active recall.
When you learn sentences in Japanese, do not force yourself to use them. Don’t try to remember them in order to say them. It’s too hard, and too failure prone AND, if you say the wrong thing, you might start building a bad habit, and on top of that, there might not be anyone there to correct you.This statement is non-sensical. If you are practicing production in the context of an SRS, the correct answer is in front of you. Unless you totally ignore the answer, it's extremely unlikely that you'll develop bad habits. Saying that you will is effectively saying that any study without instruction is useless.
Active recall of expressions is much more effective than passive recognition. Under passive recognition, our ability to comprehend more subtle elements is limited to our ability to "pause and think", which provides no guarantees we will be able to produce the correct structure in an arbitrary situation.
Over-reliance on one's native tongue is bad, but pragmatism is important.
One's native tongue can be used to prompt active recall of questions. Provided
the native tongue is used simply as a tool and not interpreted as a direct
translation, it can be very useful.
