Reflections on listening comprehension in learning a language. Babies developing speech during the infantile amnesia per

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mentecuerpo
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Reflections on listening comprehension in learning a language. Babies developing speech during the infantile amnesia per

Postby mentecuerpo » Wed Apr 14, 2021 4:46 am

I wonder if these numbers are accurate according to the paper below: the language skills acquisition: 45% listening, 30% speaking, 15% reading, 10% writing.

"Also, every study conducted regarding the language skills acquisition has proved that when we communicate, we gain 45% of language competence from listening, 30% from speaking, 15% from reading and 10% from writing."

Source: https://www.ripublication.com/ijeisv1n1 ... 4n1_13.pdf

When I was born, more Salvadorians than today did not know how to read and write. Now the literacy rate is 90 % in El Salvador.

Acquiring the mother tongue happens with speech interactions with the baby and the caretakers, since newborns. Typically a child is fluent in the native language by three years old. I have notices that the so-called "childhood amnesia" typically matches the period when children are developing their first language.

Adults do not have memories of early childhood.

Is this in any way related to the process of acquiring the first language? It may be a complex topic to research in the field of child development.

Children on average, learn to read and write by age 5-7, at this time the childhood amnesia is over.

More on childhood amnesia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood ... 0of%20time.

For us adults, reading and writing the new language can speed up learning a second language, but it is not required.

For example, the polyglot Vladimir Skultety recommends Westerners learning Chinese not to focus on learning to read or write Chinese characters at first. Vladimir recommends doing a lot of audio input exposure in the early stages of learning a complex language.
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Cainntear
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Re: Reflections on listening comprehension in learning a language. Babies developing speech during the infantile amnesia

Postby Cainntear » Wed Apr 14, 2021 11:19 am

Immediate red flag:
Listening has an important place in learning as it is one of the four major skills in language acquisition.

Ah, "the four skills". It's a reductionist oversimplification of language. These are more accurately described as "the 4 macroskills", because they all share component skills such as lexis and syntax.

Furthermore, the argument in the paper isn't even consistent, because it starts with this hard distinction of "four skills" and yet says that every other skill essentially flows from listening, which means they can't really be four distinct skills at all.

And even then, it talks about listening strategies that do not transfer to output -- if I can infer gist from context, then I do not need to attend to the syntax and lexis, so I do not learn to produce language.

The paper does nothing more than restate things that have been said a million times before in a way that is vague to the point of valuelessness.

As to the specific point of the figure you quote, I give the paper zero credibility on that count...
Also, every study conducted regarding the language skills acquisition has proved that when we communicate, we gain 45% of language competence from listening, 30% from speaking, 15% from reading and 10% from writing.

First up, he/she has given absolutely no citation to any source that we can cross-reference to verify the figures, which would be bad enough if he/she didn't make the extreme claim that every study gives the same figures. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

There's a lot of background context to those figures that simply hasn't been provided, so the figures cannot be evaluated.
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Re: Reflections on listening comprehension in learning a language. Babies developing speech during the infantile amnesia

Postby Iversen » Wed Apr 14, 2021 1:07 pm

mentecuerpo wrote:Adults do not have memories of early childhood.


I can still remember the period where I was learning to pronounce the sequence sk- (on the Iberian peninsula it seems they never learnt it). I may have been three years old before I had mastered spoken Danish fully. At that age some wonder kids can already recite Latin poems.

And even though it isn't directly relevant for language learning I have to mention that I have memories from a highrise complex where my familie lived until I was two years old, and then we moved away - and no, it's not my mother who told me what to remember because she was not present in several of those memories. I think the ability to remember things at a young age has been underestimated because kids may remember things, but after ten or twenty years they have forgotten those early memories. For some reason I just kept them alive.

As for the claim that all language learning flows from listening (or 45%, whatever..). When I arrived in Milano in the summer of 1972 I had practically no experience with spoken Italian - I had learnt it from a book, and the only cases where I spoke it was when my teacher in French suddenly posed me a question in Spanish or Italian just for fun (he knew I had studied those languages at home). And I didn't really listen to Don Camillo and the few other Italian films I watched on national TV - at that point I could read the subtitles. But in Milano my main problem was to find somebody to speak to, and next in line it was a penury of travel related vocabulary. Listening and being understood both went smoothly.

So listening can't have acounted for more than 2,37 % of my Italian skills at that point, but I knew enough Italian to communicate orally.
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Re: Reflections on listening comprehension in learning a language. Babies developing speech during the infantile amnesia

Postby golyplot » Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:59 pm

Iversen wrote:I think the ability to remember things at a young age has been underestimated because kids may remember things, but after ten or twenty years they have forgotten those early memories. For some reason I just kept them alive.


I remember that at age 7, I still had some memories of when I was 3. Unfortunately, I later forgot them, so now all I have is memories of memories.
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