Iversen wrote:Cainntear wrote:Teaching well is neutral to student preferences. A student who values fluency over accuracy will benefit because being able to effortlessly get the syntax write means they can speak faster and be more comprehensible.
Student preferences undermine the idea that there is one single thing which could be called "teaching well".
Some people prefer sugary foods. This does not disprove the healthiness of a low-sugar diet.
I argue frequently that learner differences are overstated.
Learner preferences are a form of prejudice -- if someone say "this can't work because it doesn't use the techniques that I believe are necessary," they're hardly going to give the technique a fair chance.
Yes, teachers have to account for learner preference and try to work round it. If someone is genuinely resistant to doing things in a more effective manner, you either change to match them (if it's one-on-one) or you give them their money back and let them be on their way (if it's a class, cause you can't sacrifice the other students because of one person's rigid thinking).
But the other real learner difference is that different learners may have different tolerance to suboptimal teaching, and this is my real point here. The fact that students can succeed despite certain gaps is in no way proof that they succeed because those gaps were there in the first place. If you fill those gaps, they don't have to go to the effort of filling them themselves, so they have more energy to devote to actually
learning.
Filling a gap is only working out what to learn -- it isn't ever "learning it".For example: I had a one-hour lesson in a new language as part of my CELTA. The idea was to give us first-hand experience of going into a language classroom with zero language knowledge, and to have the language taught to us monolingually.
I did worse than the rest of the class. Why? Because I took the opportunity to genuinely approach it as a "no L1" classroom. I barely learned any of the concrete vocab the teacher had brought props for. My classmates knew lots of words and could give them... but they could also express "the Finnish for
key is..." and the like.
Basically, they had used L1
in their heads and had connected the L2 words to the L1 equivalent. I have second-hand experience of people learning in a way that looks "monolingual" on the surface, but their responses seemed to me to suggest that they had actively used L1->L2 translation as a strategy for success.
I therefore believe there is no such thing as a genuinely monolingual classroom or an individual learner whose style can by genuinely tagged as "monolingual".
The problem with the monolingual classroom is that the teacher isn't giving an L1->L2 translation strategy or equivalence mapping, and the student is free to develop their own (e.g. how long does it take the L2-only student to realise that "comida" means lunch specifically as well as food in general?
Along the way I have found out the fossile errors is a myth: the thing that has fossilized is the complacency of the learner. You are in a better position to correct an error when you already know a language reasonably well, but precisely at that point you may be too satisfied with what you have got to bother.
I had a friend who tutored in his native language (French) and in his L2 (English). When you had a conversation, he would have a very heavy French accent, including a lack of either TH phoneme (/ð/ or /θ/), but when telling people who to pronounce words he would say it perfectly.
I had a conversation with him about that, and he said he knew he could fix it, but it wasn't worth his time. As far as his brain was concerned, "the" started with /z/ and "think" started with /t/. Learning the distinction essentially meant taking a big pile of words and relearning them all and he reckoned it would be over a year. But he was quite confident that if his school teacher had been able to pronounce /ð/ differently from /z/ and /θ/ differently from /t/ (and had corrected him when he used the wrong one!) then he would have had the distinction without effort.
I have mentioned my separation between intensive studies and extensive studies several times here. The intensive ones is where I collect facts, and that's a slow process where I have to be meticuluous about things.
Here's what I think is the nub of the problem: we are all good at doing these intensive study periods, and we are therefore predisposed to see them as effective and useful; but I think these intensive techniques shouldn't be necessary, and we can do better and learn quicker with a learning method that doesn't need them.
Such a method would also be open to people who aren't actually good at the same intensive techniques that most of us here are.
