Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

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reineke
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Re: Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

Postby reineke » Sat Feb 25, 2017 4:20 am

Teango wrote:@reineke
Some really interesting articles regarding word recognition there, frater R...bene facis for the breakfast reading! :)


Folse concedes... victory for the implicit learning people!

If you can catch a new word through listening, you may be able to figure out its meaning through context, you may get a general idea what the word means, and, finally, you may not have a clue what it means. Nothing prevents you from consulting a dictionary. One's natural ability to assimilate vocabulary or simply the perceived necessity to write things down does not invalidate the importance and usefuleness of being able to extricate a new word from a stream of sound.

According to Nation (2001), "knowing" a word involves 18 different types of lexical knowledge. That Folse article sums it up nicely. I don't see the knowledge of polysemy, spelling, pronunciation, usage and collocation developing at once. Can we collect all this knowledge from written records without forming any notions about pronunciation, prosody, etc.? The common sense idea that one first gets up to speed through vocabulary study and reading and then polishes this knowledge through listening is tempting but I find that it creates proficient readers whose pronunciation is poor and who often complain about not being able to follow simple TV programs. It's not all bad news. It's possible to fix and improve things, of course, but I don't care to go that way..

I am not a believer in vocabulary cramming as it creates some really odd results. The best word lists are those collected from reading and listening to meaningful content. While I believe that writing things down could help me push that word or expression into the active category, I rarely practice it. I've always found it sufficient to "just" listen to interesting content. I like to turn things upside down I don't consciously avoid books because of some theory but I have discovered that, in the beginning, I naturally prefer sources that include the core spoken language in some meaningful form. I've learned that this basic approach creates robust knowledge that can withstand many years of abuse.
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Re: Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

Postby Bakunin » Sat Feb 25, 2017 4:22 am

@Ingaræð: Apologies for my sloppy choice of words when I grouped all of the reasons why one could possibly be unable to learn by listening into “learning disability”. I understand that this has come across as disrespectful and arrogant. You’re rightly pointing out that there are more possible reasons including auditory processing difficulties. I will try be more careful with my choice of words going forward, especially in text based discussions. I also would like to add here that having such difficulties, being deaf, having a learning disability etc. doesn’t detract anything from our basic humanity. We all have areas where we struggle or are different, me included, and all of us deserve respect and have human dignity.

I’m not coming from the angle of auditory difficulties etc. I’m coming from the observation that humans have been using language for (best guess) hundreds of thousands of years, mostly in highly multilingual environments. Widespread literacy, on the other hand, has been around for maybe 200 years in our neck of the woods. It seems beyond belief that humans would require writing in any shape or form to learn language unless there are specific personal circumstances. People tend to confuse language and writing and this really irritates the heck out of me.

The second angle I’m coming from is as an immigrant living in Switzerland. Swiss-German is an unwritten language. Switzerland has a very high percentage of immigrants. Nevertheless most people seem to learn Swiss-German just fine. The vast majority of them learns it exclusively through listening, speaking and interacting. This personal experience just substantiates the more general point made above.

Whether reading is more efficient in terms of vocabulary acquisition is a completely different question (and actually the topic of this thread, so I should probably shut up at some point). It is not a contradiction to say that almost all humans have the capability to learn language through listening, speaking and interaction alone, and also to say that learning through reading is more efficient than learning through listening.

@reineke: Thanks for digging up these really interesting studies!
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Ingaræð
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Re: Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

Postby Ingaræð » Sat Feb 25, 2017 10:03 am

Bakunin: I completely agree with your post. :)

With regards to efficiency, and based on both what others have written and my own experience, I'm wondering if this shouldn't be an 'either/or' situation. Perhaps the most efficient way of learning vocabulary is through listening first, and then supporting that with visual input (e.g. a picture or reading) to cement the new words into your brain?
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Re: Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

Postby Finny » Tue Feb 28, 2017 1:58 am

I've posted something along these lines before, but since this thread tackles one of my pet interest areas, I'll post it again:

For me, listening to the radio and reading books appear to be the magic formula for my learning a language. When I learned Spanish, I'd listen to the radio for about 2h a day during my commutes from work to school to home, in addition to reading books at a variety of levels and watching a few telenovela series. However, the listening and reading parts were huge, absolutely huge.

In particular, my accent and aural comprehension as well as a large amount of my grammar instinct came purely from listening to the radio, and hearing lots of native speakers say native things at native speeds. The reading also taught me grammar and vocabulary, and a lot of it. However, I'd say listening played the primary role in both understanding speech and accent development, while reading played the primary role in vocab acquisition and in grammar understanding.

If I could only choose one of the two, it would be listening, hands down, since there are far more fluent illiterate speakers around the globe than fluent speakers who learned languages completely by reading them and never by hearing them. As Bakunin notes, language has historically been an oral process, and not a written one.

When learning French, I spent a lot of time watching TV and some time reading at first. Now I've cut out almost all TV and replaced it with radio listening as well as some reading, and I feel much more at ease. I don't have the attention or interest to watch lots of TV, but I can pipe radio into my ears while surfing the Internet for hours. I might not pay attention to it, but when I do, even for a few seconds at a time, I know it's teaching me in a way that I don't learn from TV; I'd guess it taxes my language-processing systems more, which results in my brain absorbing more of the language in a usable way. With TV, it's too easy to pick up context clues and leave lots of language by the wayside, because the "good enough" language point for following TV content is much lower than the equivalent point for following radio content, at least for me.

At any rate, my main recommendation for anyone learning a language would be to figure out which techniques work best for them, and then to use those. This experience (and confidence) is one of the primary factors that distinguish experts from novices in most fields.
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Re: Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?

Postby reineke » Wed Mar 01, 2017 9:40 pm

THE PLEASURES OF BEING READ TO

"Harold Bloom, the literary critic, once expressed doubt about the audiobook. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” he told the Times. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” While this is perhaps true for serious literary criticism, it’s manifestly not true when it comes to experiencing a book purely for the pleasure of its characters, setting, dialogue, drama, and the Scheherazadean impulse to know what happens next—which, all apologies to Bloom, is why most people pick up a book in the first place. Homer, after all, was an oral storyteller, as were all “literary artists” who came before him, back to when storytelling, around the primal campfire, would have been invented—grounds for the argument that our brains were first (and thus best?) adapted to absorb long, complex fictions by ear, rather than by eye.

That’s an idea I ran past the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran (whom I profiled in 2009). Rama answered via e-mail, saying: “Language comprehension and production evolved in connection with HEARING probably 150,000 yrs ago and to some extent is ‘hard wired’; whereas writing is 5000 to 7000 years old—partially going piggyback on the same circuits but partially involving new brain structures like the left angular gyrus (damage to which disrupts reading, writing and arithmetic). So it’s possible that listening to speech (including such things as cadence, rhythm and intonation) is more spontaneously comprehensible and linked to emotional brain centres – hence more evocative and natural.”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-tur ... ng-read-to
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