Beli Tsar wrote:Cainntear wrote:While this study is flawed in the way it tests, in my MSc dissertation I looked into productive vs receptive instruction (i.e. retrieval vs recognition) for beginners, and those who typed out their answers in the instruction got higher scores in recognition tests than those who received instruction through recognition tasks. The learners who had a mix of activities in their lessons got scores that were not quite as high as the ones who only did productive (typing/retrieval) activities.
Obviously you will know the relevant studies far better than I do, Cainntear, but isn't this also supported by a whole range of studies in non-language based learning, and the results from online SRS systems as well? i.e. you did a controlled study that demonstrated firmly what we should expect from other sources? Being forced to retrieve a memory yourself is always better than being prompted, at least in terms of strength of memory?
It was absolutely what I expected, but what surprised me was that a lot of the literature from intermediate learners was suggesting that productive practice developed productive skills and receptive practice developed receptive skills, and that there wasn't much crossover. I'm very dubious about that sort of claim, but I guess that all hangs on what they were actually testing and how. I was teaching absolute beginners, so I wasn't trying to get them to be more fluent or correct in things they'd maybe been taught earlier, but to acquire the vocab and grammar from nothing.
So that, essentially, recall is weakest on totally passive study methods (reading the word a lot); a lot stronger when we have to see it but passively recall it (e.g. recognition cards in Anki); and substantially stronger still for any learning method where we are required to recall it entirely, and especially where that is 'live' recall (e.g. speech)?
I think it's probably more subtle than that. Is passive recall in Anki better than reading a lot? Probably not, because Anki favours memorisation over internalisation.
Here's a little anecdote of something that happened to me while I was studying Gaelic with flashcard software.
I was asked to translate "eye", and I couldn't. Not because I didn't know the word, but my brain froze and didn't know
what word I was thinking about. On a conscious level, I knew that it was eye, but my subconscious brain heard the sound and even though the spelling "eye" was right in front of me, my brain couldn't accept that it was definitely "eye" and not "I" or "aye". I couldn't consciously force my subconscious to picture a human eye and disambiguate. It was weird, but it certainly gave me an insight into the limitations of decontextualised practice.
Now if you read a lot and come across the word in reading
in context, then recognition is going to require recalling the meaning of the word, while responses to flashcards don't -- they just require a conditioned response to identical stimulus.
But if you mean just reading your list of words -- you're right, that isn't exercise. I gave up reading my word lists in high school French when I realised that I was memorising the list and the only way to recall the word was to go through the list. I might not have realised how bad this was if I hadn't already known a few words of French from childhood holidays. I knew "fraise" and "framboise" from jam and yoghurt flavours, and it struck me as odd that I was finding myself unable to say one without also recalling the other despite having been saying them independently for years.
However, that only works if you actually process the words when you're reading them -- for example, as I often say, people don't generally notice which preposition they're seeing or hearing, just that there's a preposition there, and then their brain interprets it as whatever preposition they expect in that position.
I suspect the levels are something like: nouns & verbs > adjectives > adverbs > prepositions and articles
Items that are on the left are probably more open to learning by exposure, whereas ones on the left will need more conscious study.
I'm sure Duolingo and Memrise have both pointed out how much better people do with typing the answers, and that most of us have experience that demonstrates this too.
But Duolingo have failed to find ways to motivate learners to do this, which is one of the things I resent them for