Early production vs early reception

General discussion about learning languages
Online
Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3469
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8665
Contact:

Early production vs early reception

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jul 07, 2019 10:41 am

So I keep forgetting to tell you about the findings of my masters study (2 years ago now!)

A few of you took part (thanks again!) but here's a short description of the whole thing:
The study looked at the relative benefits of receptive vs productive exercises for absolute beginners of a language, using Scottish Gaelic.

The start of the course involved learning vocabulary for four items of clothing (two masculine singular, two plural (there's no gender marking in plural in ScG)) and four colours (two of which decline for number, two of which don't). Then it moved on to short noun phrases like "a yellow T-shirt" or "red spectacles" (there's no indefinite article in Gaelic, so these were even more similar in gaelic). It then embedded these in a sentence: "he/she's wearing X", and finally adding in "and": "he/she's wearing X and Y".

Language was presented with images and the target language (no translation) and when it came to teaching the sentence form, an arrow was used on an image of a person to indicate which item was being discussed (all pictures were wearing all 4 items of clothing).

Productive learners had to type the correct answer in response to an image prompt, and if they made a mistake, they would be shown the correct answer and forced to type it before moving on.
Receptive learners had to select the correct image to match a Gaelic prompt, and if they made a mistake, they would have to keep clicking until they found the correct answer before moving on.
There were also two "hybrid" groups, one that did the first half of each lesson productively, then the second receptively, and the other receptively then productively.

The teaching was done over 4 days with a test on the 5th day, and an equivalent (but not identical) test 1 week later. The tests were in 3 parts: productive, then receptive, then productive again.

Testing was done with both productive and receptive tasks.

My study was too small in terms of both participants and language points covered to get any statistically significant results, but the overall finding was that the productive-only group did better than other groups in every single part of the test, and the receptive-only group did the worst in all sections, including the receptive tests.

This doesn't match the findings of studies in my literature review that found that teaching receptively led to better performance on receptive tests than teaching productively. My guess is that this is a consequence of being an absolute beginner -- if you don't know the systems of the language, it's hard to process receptive input, whereas productive output absolutely requires processing, so you are forced to interact with the systems.

Of course, these differences may not lead to better long-term acquisition and retention, but personally, I'd be surprised.
12 x

User avatar
sporedandroid
Blue Belt
Posts: 656
Joined: Mon Jan 07, 2019 6:54 am
Languages: English (N), Spanish (heritage/intermediate), Hebrew (A2-B1)
x 1371

Re: Early production vs early reception

Postby sporedandroid » Sun Jul 07, 2019 6:11 pm

Even if producing language has any benefit for receptive skills any benefit I may get will be outweighed by all the anxiety I have over producing the language as an absolute beginner.
1 x

User avatar
IronMike
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2554
Joined: Thu May 12, 2016 6:13 am
Location: Northern Virginia
Languages: Studying: Esperanto
Maintaining: nada
Tested:
BCS, 1+L/1+R (DLPT5, 2022)
Russian, 3/3 (DLPT5, 2022) 2+ (OPI, 2022)
German, 2L/1+R (DLPT5, 2021)
Italian, 1L/2R (DLPT IV, 2019)
Esperanto, C1 (KER skriba ekzameno, 2017)
Slovene, 2+L/3R (DLPT II in, yes, 1999)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5189
x 7265
Contact:

Re: Early production vs early reception

Postby IronMike » Sun Jul 07, 2019 9:06 pm

Is your thesis available anywhere to read?
0 x
You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
CEFR --> ILR/DLPT equivalencies
My swimming life.
My reading life.

Online
Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3469
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8665
Contact:

Re: Early production vs early reception

Postby Cainntear » Mon Jul 08, 2019 9:14 am

IronMike wrote:Is your thesis available anywhere to read?

Just uploaded it to http://lingua.guru/zz/dissertation%202536385%20final.docx.
4 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: nagoyana, Raconteur, tiia and 2 guests