Useful info about CI methods?

[Kraut]

I wonder how good old Krashen might go about teaching Lithuanian, a language with no word order, no articles .. but with declensions in seven cases everywhere .. numerals included.

"Two elderly women" will turn up like this:

Nominative: dvi pagyvenusios moterys
Genitive: dviejų pagyvenusių moterų
Dative: dviem pagyvenusioms moterims
Accusative: dvi pagyvenusias moteris
Instrumental: dviem pagyvenusiomis moterimis
Locative: dviejose pagyvenusiose moterėse
Vocative: dvi pagyvenusios moterys

Most words you learn consist of a semantic part combined with a grammatical ending.

[galaxyrocker]

I wonder how good old Krashen might go about teaching Lithuanian, a language with no word order, no articles .. but with declensions in seven cases everywhere .. numerals included.

I would assume it'd look something like LLPSI, at least for written Lithuanian. Though how that'd be adapted to seven cases without as many easily spotted cognates (thanks to borrowings) would be more interesting to see.

[Le Baron]

Remind me to not learn Lithuanian.

[easync]

I wonder how good old Krashen might go about teaching Lithuanian, a language with no word order, no articles .. but with declensions in seven cases everywhere .. numerals included.

The more complex the grammar, the bigger of a distraction it is, I think. I could see someone fall into the trap of trying to memorize and then compute all this in real-time while trying to speak a language they have barely even heard yet - then giving up because it's insanely overwhelming. While natives on the other hand, can understand and speak the language without even being aware of these categories and concepts.

In Serbian, I've forgotten pretty much all of the explicit grammar they taught me in school. The way cases were taught, was basically having a question and answer i.e. what/who is doing the verb? what/who is the verb being done to? to whom/what (direction)? with who/what? etc. and then looking at the sentence and seeing what matches. About half the people struggled with even identifying what the case was, but had no problem using it correctly when they weren't thinking about it in natural speech. Of course, there were examples where people made "mistakes" in the sense that the way they talked didn't conform to the standard language as described and the teachers made a fuss about it, how always speaking with the proper cases is a sign of being educated, but generally people talked correctly and relied on their intuition, more so than abstract rules and concepts.

An input approach would basically treat this like any other language, you find sentences, the simpler the better and figure out what they mean and build your way up in complexity. Vocative in Serbian if I recall correctly is just the case when you call someone, so there was no question, but rather just "Hey X" and you just had an intuitive feel how X needed to end in order for it to not feel weird or wrong, because as a native you've heard that a million times. For stuff like Nominative and Accusative, it's just the subject and object of a sentence but you don't need to think actively about these concepts, because if you're understanding the sentence, you know who's doing what to whom and in what direction and with what tool etc. You start noticing the endings and connecting them to the meaning, because those same endings are what help you discern the meaning. From my observation, comprehension starts out with a big picture and then gradually narrows in and gets sharper, so at first you're identifying single words and their general shape, then you start noticing the endings and how X"a" and X"y" changes the meaning in a subtle way. Aha, he chopped the wood with the axe, rather than the axe with the wood, which makes less sense in this context. Eventually, after a long ass time, you acquire it. I don't believe there is a satisfying shortcut to this, but you can always hedge your bets and also study some amount of grammar, just to feel safe

[cpnlsn88]

Kraut wrote:
I wonder how good old Krashen might go about teaching Lithuanian, a language with no word order, no articles .. but with declensions in seven cases everywhere .. numerals included.

Good question. Different types of language entail different types of grammar challenges - including case systems pose different challenges.

A little grammar goes a long way. I am not in favour of learning complicated tables of declensions and a lot of such systems can be absorbed through contact in the manner described by Krashen. My experience of cases is really oine Greek and Latin. I find that there are certain pharases and contexts that carry their own declensions. Thus are the cases taught implicitly.

One thing I think is that this is an instance where reading i - 1 (as I understand it) has value - at least for a time. Not quite the same thing but I find reading German at a lower level is a good way of cementing understanding of the case system and verb declensions. Of course you need to find the appropriate content (of course that's my way of understanding i + 1 - but that might be a misunderstanding on my part, assuming it relates to words known, as opposed to grammatical features).

How do you teach a case system? I would say, if by grammar, then one at a time, not the whole system in one go. And some cases will be more predominent - usually accusative, dative and genitive. The rest will fit in in their own time. You can learn common phrases and then look things up in your grammar text if your needing to check for a piece of work.

Anyway, grammar is not the enemy. If it helps then do some grammar. By all means have conjugation and declension tables you occasionally consult. If you're doing a formal piece of writing then have the tables open when you're doing it for easy reference.

[bombobuffoon]

The "i+1" content that everyone talks about is useful, but I feel like just as much of the actual benefit comes from the "i-1" content—the stuff that's already recognizable, and even slightly below my level, but which gets repeated over and over.

This reminded of a (theorizing) video by Matt vs Japan

specifically the parts at 18:25-19:12 and 19:35-22:19
He basically says, that when the learner encounters a new sentence and expects to understand it but doesn't (because they believe they understand all the parts but can't figure out how it all comes together), it's because the sentence is actually too many steps above their current intuitive level of understanding ability. But when the same learner encounters a sentence and understands it, they often believe that it was because there was nothing new in the sentence and they haven't learned anything from it, but, in reality, this sentence might contain some small subtle point (of grammar, usage, etc.), that the learner hasn't mastered yet but was able to get this time (because the sentence wasn't beyond their ability to grasp it from their current level of understanding), and through these easy sentences the learner actually pushes their language ability forward (even though they feel like nothing happens).

Finally an explanation. I had been wondering about this a long time. Great video.

Although perhaps it misses out those like:
Often I understand the written sentence, but not the equivalent spoken form.

[cpnlsn88]

Matt vs Japan's YouTube video is quite good in explaining that knowing the words is not the only parameter by which level of difficulty is judged, and maybe not the most important.

He advocates not getting hung up on the bits you're stuck on as you may not be ready for that sentence yet. Focus on the ones you are ready for.

Links closely to the concept of opacity and transparency in language. A text or audio segment that is not at least decipherable can't be described as comprehensible input - they're beyond your current level for any one of the reasons given by Matt vs Japan.

[Kraut]

Before Krashen reinvented the wheel we had "polysemy", were told "don't overwhelm pupils with new words", the publishers took vocabulary progression seriously and created "graded readers". Now Paul Nation tells us that a new word needs more than six "meetings" for it to be stored, hmm "acquired". I think Dehaene says that word meanings are calibrated, and this takes time. It seems Krashen has only given us his "Das sind meine Augen" stunt. The "n+1" thing is unrealistic. It took me a while to come upon a text where a single word unknown to me before was so strongly imposed by context. It's "amonestados", but this worked only because I knew "mascarilla".

Nada más llegar, la impresión fue mala, ya que vimos cómo huéspedes del hotel bajaban hasta la recepción sin mascarilla y sin ser amonestados. En el desayuno, la comida estaba expuesta sin ningún tipo de protección, se permitiò que los huéspedes se pasearan por la zona del buffet sin mascarilla.

I think Krashen is in full contradiction with Stanislas Dehaene's four pillars of learning, which has a testing phase shortly after getting acquainted with something new.

[Cainntear]

I wonder how good old Krashen might go about teaching Lithuanian, a language with no word order, no articles .. but with declensions in seven cases everywhere .. numerals included.

The more complex the grammar, the bigger of a distraction it is, I think.

OK, but why do you think that? Your language list says that you speak a Slavic language natively, have learned English to fluency, learned German and Spanish to intermediate level and have basic Spanish. In all of those, the biggest grammatical challenge to you would have been definite and indefinite articles. Of your L2s, the most complex grammar is German, but many of the biggest difficulties learners from western Europe have with German is the case system, and that's something that isn't as much of a challenge to a Slavic speaker.

The most commone pedagogical movement in the years after Krashen's CI was the "communicative approach", where sentences were given in response to communicative need. The CA built on Krashen by not simply assuming that they had understood and would learn, and instead leant on Merrill Swain's idea that output was the only way to test a theory. In true CA lessons, there was no explicit grammar instructions -- the CA philosophy was about implicit grammar instruction, with the idea being that students would inductively learn rules from examples they knew the meaning of.

This sort of thinking was seductive, and it worked well enough in languages with low grammatical complexity that people became convinced it was the right thing.

However, I saw a paper by a Finnish researcher published when there was a move against implicit grammar. The paper opened with a point that Finnish had abandoned CI and CA because Finnish was different enough that with implicit grammar, people would just have far too much L1 interference. The case system in particular is very different from IE languages, and a lot of people would assume correspondences with particular prepositions or cases from their L1 based on the first few examples they saw.

The paper (IIRC!) was giving information on what come practice was in Finland as a "tried and tested" way of doing explicit grammar practice, because the need for explicit grammar was completely clear in Finnish precisely because of the complexity of its grammar.

I could see someone fall into the trap of trying to memorize and then compute all this in real-time while trying to speak a language they have barely even heard yet - then giving up because it's insanely overwhelming. While natives on the other hand, can understand and speak the language without even being aware of these categories and concepts.

But L1 interference exists.

Infants are learning language as well as learning a language; adults have already learned language and are only learning a new language. The first language acquired shapes what you assume "language" to be, and then any subsequent attempt at language learning will be interpreted through that lens. Learning a new language means picking up language variables you never even thought about before, and your brain won't do that automatically -- which is why we need explicit focus on grammar.

In Serbian, I've forgotten pretty much all of the explicit grammar they taught me in school. The way cases were taught, was basically having a question and answer i.e. what/who is doing the verb? what/who is the verb being done to? to whom/what (direction)? with who/what? etc. and then looking at the sentence and seeing what matches. About half the people struggled with even identifying what the case was, but had no problem using it correctly when they weren't thinking about it in natural speech. Of course, there were examples where people made "mistakes" in the sense that the way they talked didn't conform to the standard language as described and the teachers made a fuss about it, how always speaking with the proper cases is a sign of being educated, but generally people talked correctly and relied on their intuition, more so than abstract rules and concepts.

How is that relevant? You learned nothing from studying a charicature of the grammar of your native language... fine. But they weren't trying to teach you how to ask where the station is, so it's pretty incomparable with actually learning a new language.

An input approach would basically treat this like any other language, you find sentences, the simpler the better and figure out what they mean and build your way up in complexity.

This is an ideological stance, and you haven't given any reason to assume it to be true. How successful have input approaches been in similar situations? Have you hear of any.

Vocative in Serbian if I recall correctly is just the case when you call someone, so there was no question, but rather just "Hey X" and you just had an intuitive feel how X needed to end in order for it to not feel weird or wrong, because as a native you've heard that a million times.

"as a native"... but how is that relevant to learners? English doesn't have a vocative, so how would an English speaker even know that there was a difference between the John in "Hey John" and "John died"?

For stuff like Nominative and Accusative, it's just the subject and object of a sentence but you don't need to think actively about these concepts,

If you speak a language with no case system at all, you absolutely do. Even English speakers are thrown by it, and we still have a vestigial case system in our pronouns.
Then when we add in dative, ablative, instrumental etc it gets totally baffling. Have you ever looked at the number of questions that pop up on the internet about these things appearing in Duolingo without explanation?

because if you're understanding the sentence, you know who's doing what to whom and in what direction and with what tool etc. You start noticing the endings and connecting them to the meaning, because those same endings are what help you discern the meaning.

No. You starteth ignoringato thebl endingsity becausefl yough completelywer understanduffo thegl sentenceucho withoutumma readinga themaglo.

The biggest problem in language learning is that language is full of natural redundancy, so you don't need to pay attention to them.

You have presented an ideological belief as fact, when it absolutely is not.

From my observation, comprehension starts out with a big picture and then gradually narrows in and gets sharper, so at first you're identifying single words and their general shape, then you start noticing the endings and how X"a" and X"y" changes the meaning in a subtle way.

Who exactly have you observed?

Aha, he chopped the wood with the axe, rather than the axe with the wood, which makes less sense in this context.

Why do you need to stop and think, though? You've understood -- just move on; nothing more to see.

Eventually, after a long ass time, you acquire it.

What is your evidence of this?

I don't believe there is a satisfying shortcut to this, but you can always hedge your bets and also study some amount of grammar, just to feel safe

Sorry, but how is it "hedging your bets" to do something that leads to superior results in a demonstrably shorter length of time? Isn't it really a "satisfying shortcut"...?

[Cainntear]

A little grammar goes a long way. I am not in favour of learning complicated tables of declensions and a lot of such systems can be absorbed through contact in the manner described by Krashen.

I think you're taking a leap too far here, though.

Grammar tables are designed for paper, not for human brains. This is something I had never thought about before MT; I always took it for granted that learning grammar meant learning tables, but MT taught verb conjugations explicitly without ever giving a list or a table. Rejecting tables does not lead to accepting Krashen's pontifications.

My experience of cases is really oine Greek and Latin. I find that there are certain pharases and contexts that carry their own declensions. Thus are the cases taught implicitly.

That was a big thing in the Communicative Approach days -- the idea of students inductive acquiring grammar from examples. It didn't really work, and the CA was on it's way out in the 1990s and only got a second wind because it was the easiest way to fill the global demand for English teachers with people straight out of school looking for a gap-year working holiday.

How do you teach a case system? I would say, if by grammar, then one at a time, not the whole system in one go. And some cases will be more predominent - usually accusative, dative and genitive.

Absolutely, and this is where MT really points.

The rest will fit in in their own time. You can learn common phrases and then look things up in your grammar text if your needing to check for a piece of work.

I'm not sure that's the right way round. MT would explicitly teach a grammar point and reinforce it by using fairly generic sentences, and the communicative approach used formulaic sentences with no grammar explanation. People using the CA could often parrot off memorised sentences and sound really good, but struggle to produce sentences that were genuinely new without devolving into Tarzan-speak.