issemiyaki wrote:The teacher cannot “bestow” language on you; you have to do all the work yourself; they are coaches at best. This is a big problem that I see with people who use teachers and classes; they try to put some of the responsibility for learning the language on the teacher. Beyond relying on them to prepare effective study materials, this is a big mistake.
I never once in this thread even slightly insinuated that a teacher could "bestow" language on you. In the original post, I am the one who said: "It is the student who must walk the last mile alone on his road to fluency."
In the end, you are the one who has to take it upon yourself to diligently make that effort to learn.
CAVESA WROTE: You didn't insinuate that, but the name of your thread glorifies teachers as some sort of huge power to be harnessed. Nope, most of them are just obstacles (to use a polite term).
I did not glorify anyone. In fact, I myself am the one who put a question mark in the title!
The very word "harnessing" implies exploiting something, using it as YOU see fit. I'm not seeking to take any autonomy away from any self-learner, including myself.
You are projecting intentions on me that are not my own.
I was the first to admit that I did not have great experiences with teachers in the past.
It was only when I finally stumbled onto a good one that I thought, hmmm, perhaps, there something more there.
Then, while studying in the library and coming across literally hundreds of scholarly journals on the pedagogy of language teaching, I thought even more – hey: what’s out there? What more can I learn?
And there is a problem with the "you need to walk the last mile" mindset. First, you need to walk all the miles. It is not about a teacher getting you far and you just finishing tiny bits. More often, a teacher is the countercurrent you need to swim against, unless you have a way to take a different path.
And "the responsibility for learning". I see far too often teachers and similarly minded people use this, but in the sense of "responsibility for doing what the teacher tells you". Not in the sense of being the master of your learning plan.
On the issue of walking the last mile – I totally disagree with you. I am learning wonderful nuances about perfective and imperfective verbs that would have taken me a long time to learn. But thanks to help of my teacher, I’m making strides. That’s just one example of someone helping me on my journey.
Of course, I will take that information out into the world and now practice myself.
But no man is an island. Even the tutors and a native speaker you ask for clarification are a form of assistance.
The usual first action of most teachers is like "hmm, nice, but you should throw all this away and do it my way." They refuse to become part of the game of someone responsible for their own learning.
Again, I agree there are some dreadful, power hungry, wretched teachers out there. I know this, too.
That is WHY I had a long conversation with my teacher before my lessons started with her. I laid out my goals and what I wanted to do. In fact, it turns out that her goals might be slightly more ambitious than my own. Nonetheless, if I find that I am not headed in the right direction, then I will make a decision. But now, I have decided to move out of the way and allow her to do her job.
I’ll admit, it’s hard for me to allow my teacher to sort of control the flow. But again, she often reassures that me that X will help me achieve my goal. So, she is not operating in some vacuum.
Basically, I do not want to rely on them preparing materials. I want to rely on them doing with me and the materials what I want.
The materials that my teacher has prepared have exceeded my expectations. They are much more demanding than materials I have been able to locate. Often the exercises are not directly out of a textbook. She has modified many exercises, and even created her own for me.
But nobody is asking for a perfect formula.
The “there's no perfect formula” comment I made was referring to the previous post by someone who said that, given I already know two languages, I should know how to learn languages.
Well, I actually gave teaching a chance again (because I rather hate German, that I need) and unfortunately, some of the things I already knew were confirmed. I will write about that later, when I can compare my Italian C1 path (no teacher at all), and German C1 path (expensive teaching at B2,C1). And I can tell you right away that it is simply not as miraculous as you make it be. The self teaching path is in most ways superior.
But about what you are advocating for: the beginning of your post was about "checking what the pedagogy community does", but then it quickly turned to something like "you should get a teacher, only dumb arrogant children don't".
Again, you're mischaracterizing my intentions.
The self-teaching path, as well as path of using teachers, are fraught. What I’m saying is you can dip into both wells of knowledge.
My sharing my experience with my teacher was just to illustrate some new awakenings I had experienced. I’m just sharing. It’s not an order.
Frankly, I have also shared on this forum countless experiences where certain teachers almost had me in tears. I have been on both sides of this equation.
Granted, depending on the language, it’s hard to find good teachers. However, there are many mediocre teachers who, if they are flexible, can actually be trained to be good teachers. Given you know exactly what you want, you can guide them to help you. I sort of did this with French.
My French tutor is extremely nitpicky. Loves pointing out mistakes. In the beginning it annoyed me. But eventually, I realized I can use this to my benefit. Most people wouldn't have the energy to do this sort of error correction. This guy loves it. So, I had a conversation with him and said, I would like to use your talent this way. He doesn’t really have much pedagogy, but he has a talent for sure. But is he as good as the teachers I worked with at the Alliance Française? In my opinion, absolutely. He might have fewer resources, but he is just as good. In the end, I was still in charge. I decided how the sessions would progress.
The problem is, that a lot of that research is worthless trash with bad consequences for the language learning world. As I've already said various times: If average medical research was just as sloppy as average LL research, there would be many dead people as the result.
Again – I’ll type this in plain language. I’m saying: Just take a look at what the pedagogy community is doing and see if it can be of assistance to you. If you’ve already done that, and it didn’t work for you, I understand! Then this comment is not for you. No worries.
However, there is no way I'm ready to believe all that research is flawed and useless. I do not believe that.
But they are not at odds. And you are right that more research should be done on independent learners (why just polyglots?). But the teaching community is not interested in this. For obvious reasons:
-independent learners spend less than those going to classes and other such stuff. They are also not the main center of interest for public funding either, as that is more about the main educational stream
-independent learners are harder to research, than just a few hundred students of school that cannot tell you no
-teachers usually see successful self-teaching people as a threat. And a damage to their ego.
-the researchers are in the "publish or perish" world, and they also need to come with something new at all costs. Those are some of the reasons behind the obvious low quality of their research.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Perhaps some are warranted, perhaps others are seeing things through a jaded lens. In this end, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it.