I hate (hate hate hate hate hate) people making total blanket statements of controversial personal opinions as fact. What winds me up particularly is reading through a whole page of opinions presented as fact, then reaching a minor aside that sort of (but not quite) admits that it's all just opinion. Case in point (the opening sentence of the conclusion):
In this post I’ve explained my thoughts on why I believe that learning a language using traditional language education is fundamentally flawed.
No: he doesn't explain his thoughts. He states his beliefs as fact with very little depth of explanation. Hell, his first sentence is:
Today I’m here to debunk a myth (again).
His entire argument starts and ends with "I'm right, they're wrong".
The myth is that language can somehow be transferred from the brains of a speaker to the brains of a learner by explaining the grammar and the vocabulary.
No-one of any importance believes that. Some learners do, but no teachers do. Have you ever seen a language learning book or a course that presents explanations without offering some opportunities for practice? No -- because no-one seriously proposes that as a way of learning.
All the experiences that native speakers go through when growing up contribute to shape their mental image. They form brain connections by hearing a word used in a specific context and referring to a particular meaning. Those connections keep on forming to all the different meanings a word can have, to all the contexts a word can be used in, and to all the possible grammatical usages of the word.
This has a flaw that is carried through the whole article -- he ignores the concept of
concept formation. Infants have to learn to categorise the world, both in the general sense of what categorisation is and the specific sense of what categories are.
While concepts may not always be identical across languages, they often are. Like a "car" in the sense of a four-wheeled passenger automobile is an "Auto", a "voiture", a "coche". It is literally the same concept, even if the words have additional senses that don't transfer across (e.g. a "railway car" isn't an "Auto" -- it doesn't drive itself, after all). So yes, learning individual words without any reference to concept is a bad idea...
which is why no major commercial course is just a set of Anki flashcards. (Oh wait... I forgot about Rosetta Stone, didn't I?
)
When you try to learn a word by means of other words (be it in the foreign language or in your own language), you’re making connections to the words that are being used to explain it. You’re not just lighting up the connections that native speakers have in their brain for that word.
Are you? Or are you using the L1 word to evoke the concept that you hook the L2 concept to? You cannot label a concept until you have evoked the concept (or "raised the schemata", to use an alternative term).
In a monolingual beginner's class, I'll use picture flashcards to evoke the concept. I'll even often do this in a bilingual class. But I'll clarify with words too. Like maybe I'll do the flashcards without translation then include the translation afterwards when noting down vocabulary. But if I say "I was driving the car", I've evoked the concept/raised the schema of a personal 4-wheeled automobile just as well as with my little monochrome icon of a car on a laminated piece of plastic, and I can now tell them it's voiture, coche, whatever.
Creating all those extra connections that native speakers don’t have means that rather than learning the actual meanings and usage of that word, you’re being affected by the meanings and the usage of the words that are being used to describe it, which are never the same. That brings mistaken assumptions about the meaning and the grammar.
Speaking of mistaken assumptions, it looks like he's assuming that avoiding L1 means avoiding mistaken assumptions.
Just because we don't use the L1 word, doesn't mean that the concept the L1 word describes isn't evoked. If you hold up a card that evokes the concept of apple, my preformed concept is evoked. You give me a word, I attach it to "apple".
What is the best tool humans have to challenge assumptions? Language! If you talk about assumptions, you can correct them.
It is especially bad when learners keep remembering the explanation or the translation of a word every time they encounter it.
Yes, and that shouldn't be the goal of explanations in teaching. I personally try to reduce my explanations over time, and I deliberately don't have a formulaic, memorisable explanation that I repeat every time.
The mixing of the native language, the target language, together with some extra mistaken assumptions is what results in interlanguage.
Yes, and immersive methodologies consider interlanguages as a natural part of language development, just as babies go through erroneous forms in their own language development -- "me want" etc.
His assumption that you avoid interlanguage by avoiding L1 during the learning process is completely baseless.
By trying to learn the grammar and the vocabulary using explanations, we’re doing something much more difficult than what natives do when they learn their first language.
Yes, but that's fine because we're at a much higher state of cognitive development by this point. Many adults can plan out a whole meal based on a 30-second look at the contents of a kitchen cupboard, and read and critically respond to newspaper articles.
Babies look at things and decide if they like it, want it, are scared of it etc.
So, when kids learn a language they start by knowing the context and hearing the word, and they just have to learn the meaning in that particular context.
...which means they've got to hear it loads of times to know what it means.
Meanwhile, as adults, we've got preformed concepts in our heads to apply words to, and within 5-10 repetitions we can have a good grasp of a new word.
So, how can we successfully transfer language from the minds of native speakers onto ours? Not with explanations and translations, since, as we’ve seen, those are always going to make us end up with a mental image that’s very different from that of a native speaker.
Really?
Now what if I start talking about a strange creature.
It's covered in purple fur and has a green mane. It walks on five feet -- it has two hind legs and three front legs, one on each side and one in the middle. It only has a short stub of a tail, like a bear's. It's head is a bit like a gorilla's, but it has whiskers like a cat's. It eats fruits and eggs and lives in snowy forests. In made-up-ese it's called a Wobwibber.
There's an entirely new concept. For those of you with strong visualisation skills, you can probably picture it quite well -- congratulations, you now have a new concept. OK, so the explanation isn't perfect, and even I can't resolve the colour of the head -- does the mane go up to the top of the head, ie. a green head of hair? Is the mane only on the neck, and the hair on its head purple? And what about the unhairy portion of its face? There's nothing in the explanation to describe that.
But you know what? That's OK -- I've given you enough information that you're going to recognise a Wobwibber when you see a photo, and you'll refine your idea of what one is then.
The point is that human language is used all the time to teach new concepts that we've never ever experienced before. That's what language is, what it does. It's massively efficient, which is why average people can now drive cars and operate sophisticated computer software.