Concurrent reading and listening

[Serpent]

(as for on the way, yes that's a fixed expression. I picked the German/Swedish/Danish equivalents from input)
Here's a similar discussion on the old forum btw. We used the beginning of HP too

The thing is that none of us can really say what works best for us, just what didn't fail us completely. And furthermore, we can't say why what works for us works, just that it did/didn't, unless we look at studies that have controlled for variables, and compare them to what we actually do.

Semantics. We know what works best for us in the real world. Would I learn better if I could have Zlatan Ibrahimović teaching me Croatian, Swedish and Italian?
There are pretty much no research papers on independent learners, and those focused on comprehension tend to use short texts that are little better than our examples here. If there's anything about learners who read at least three books and either figured things out from context or looked them up, I'm definitely interested.
(not to mention the sample size is usually a classroom or two)

What's the difference here?

More specifically, do you draw a line between comprehensible input and studying? Where?

I'm generally more concerned with learning from genuine, interesting sources than whether it's purely comprehensible input. I did say 50% comprehension (not coverage) was suboptimal for CI and that it depends on the language. When it comes to coverage, in Finnish less space will be "wasted" by functional words, for example, whereas the case endings and other morphology is much more helpful than the similar stuff in English. You won't understand pommi in the first sentence but you'll probably figure it out soon enough.
Now that I think of it, this also works better if we take compounds into account rather than treating them as separate words. In Finnish, German, Swedish, even Russian many unfamiliar words will be compounds (generally understood by natives without splitting).

[NoManches]

What do you think about improving lisening skills by listening to TL audio and reading the text in your mother tongue at the same time?

That's basically one of the first steps of the original L-R method. Probably better for some language combinations than others. Mega-thread here:
Listening-Reading experiments log

I really do NOT want to take this thread off topic, but I have a quick question about the L-R method. I think this question relates to the OP's question though so it should't be a big deal:

If I understand this correctly, in the L-R method a person has the option of:

1) Listening to the L2 of say, a book, while listening READING to his/her L1. (Fixed a typo)

or

2) Listening to the L2 audio of a book while reading the L2 (basically associating words with sounds).

I see how the 2nd method can be effective for improving oral comprehension, but the first? If I remember correctly, there has been research showing that watching L2 movies with L1 subtitles is not as effective as L2 movies with L2 subtitles. It just seems weird that this method can be so effective because it goes against what I would initially think of as a good language learning method.

Other questions:

Is the L-R method considered a beginners tool? Any use for it at the B2 level?

I do like the idea of intensively working with books, especially ones that come with audio. It just seems that using my native language when trying to learn an L2 is counterproductive

[Serpent]

It's not something I'd recommend. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could split my attention between audio and subtitles when watching DVDs, and even now it's still an effort for me to do it.

The thing is, the brain only has one "channel" for processing language, so you cannot read and listen simultaneously -- you have to switch your attention backwards and forwards really quickly. It's almost inevitable that you will faze out of listening and end up simply reading at some points.

1. Subtitles are not LR.
2. Using subtitles is a skill. After hundreds of hours Scandinavians don't seem to have this kind of problem. At least when the goal is not to read all of the subs, but to understand what is going on.
3. Videos steals your attention much more easily.
4. LR and subtitles are both transferrable skills. Both take some effort to learn. I choose not to worry too much about subtitles, since I watch so few movies. It's up to each learner to decide whether they want to use subs or LR if they struggle with these techniques. (same applies to dubbing)
5. so what? if you find yourself just reading, you go back. or you just skip ahead because LR takes lots of hours anyway. btw with L2/L3 I find it easier not to read ahead of the audio.

[Serpent]

1) Listening to the L2 of say, a book, while listening to his/her L1.

While reading L1 (probably a typo).

There are also several other steps. Ideally you're supposed to read the book in L1 first (I never bother), then do L2/L2 and then use a parallel text+L2 audio. After that you do things like shadowing and translating.

If I remember correctly, there has been research showing that watching L2 movies with L1 subtitles is not as effective as L2 movies with L2 subtitles.

Usings subs is not LR, as I've already said.
Also, when you're watching with subs, there are three things fighting for your attention: the video, the audio and the text. If the text is in L1 and the video is interesting, it's easy to ignore the audio. With LR there's no video.

Is the L-R method considered a beginners tool? Any use for it at the B2 level?
... It just seems that using my native language when trying to learn an L2 is counterproductive

If reading L1 to get the meaning seems counterproductive, you're too advanced for the "average" LR. You can still get a lot out of LR'ing more challenging texts, though, and at this level there's less of a need to worry about clocking the many hours.

[Voytek]

Ideally you're supposed to read the book in L1 first (I never bother), then do L2/L2 and then use a parallel text+L2 audio. After that you do things like shadowing and translating.

Have you ever tried spliting it into chapters instead of LR`ing a whole book at once?

[Serpent]

I haven't, but I think others have done it like that.
I don't think it makes sense to do the translation part so early, but otherwise it's a good idea if that's how you prefer it.

Here's more info on LR btw. Damn I forgot there's even a large collection of info in Polish.

[Cainntear]

(as for on the way, yes that's a fixed expression. I picked the German/Swedish/Danish equivalents from input)
Here's a similar discussion on the old forum btw. We used the beginning of HP too

But in this case you determined the word from the fixed expression, which I'm betting isn't what you did with German, Swedish or Danish.

The thing is that none of us can really say what works best for us, just what didn't fail us completely. And furthermore, we can't say why what works for us works, just that it did/didn't, unless we look at studies that have controlled for variables, and compare them to what we actually do.

Semantics. We know what works best for us in the real world.

Semantics? Hardly. It's not about "the real world" but just our little corner of it.

I could claim from my experience that lunch break is the best time for study, but in my case I moved from an office that was a few minutes' walk from Princes St Gardens in Edinburgh to an office on an out-of-town business park with a sort of canal/pond water-feature populated by wild waterfowl. How can I claim it was the time that was effective rather than the environment? Or even that I wasn't just kidding myself, and that the real value was in the work I did at home?

That's not semantics.

There are pretty much no research papers on independent learners, and those focused on comprehension tend to use short texts that are little better than our examples here. If there's anything about learners who read at least three books and either figured things out from context or looked them up, I'm definitely interested.
(not to mention the sample size is usually a classroom or two)

Of course there are practically no research papers on independent learners. You can't make any useful conclusions without controlling for variables, and independent learners are as diverse a group as you can get -- any conclusions drawn against a study of independent learners would be shaky at best. That's why it has to be a small number of classes -- you have to have similar groups to start off with.

The study I was reading about LR (or RL in the paper) took a whole year group at a university and split them into 3 groups -- read-only, listen-only and read-while-listening. This study found that the read-while-listening group improved in their listening ability more than either of the other two. This was done over a whole semester of extensive input, using graded readers for learners. The effects were pretty consistent across the whole class, so it's hard to really dismiss it as not being widely applicable.
(Chang & Millett 2013, The effect of extensive listening on developing L2 listening fluency: some hard evidence. ELT journal)

Anyhow, if us independent learners are unique and different from classroom learners, then surely we should all shut up and not give any advice -- if we're different, then our techniques are surely less widely applicable than the outcomes of classroom research...?

What's the difference here?

More specifically, do you draw a line between comprehensible input and studying? Where?

The line is simple: CI assumes you acquire through understanding. If you believe in the value of conscious study and learning, then you're not talking about CI.

[Cainntear]

It's not something I'd recommend. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could split my attention between audio and subtitles when watching DVDs, and even now it's still an effort for me to do it.

The thing is, the brain only has one "channel" for processing language, so you cannot read and listen simultaneously -- you have to switch your attention backwards and forwards really quickly. It's almost inevitable that you will faze out of listening and end up simply reading at some points.

1. Subtitles are not LR.

Irrelevant. Whether we're talking about reading an L1 book while listening to an L2 audiobook, or reading terse L1 subtitles while watching a more flowery L2 dialogue, you still need to switch between two sources of language. In fact, subtitles are easier, if anything, because they're shorter and more direct, leaving you more time to process the L2 input.

2. Using subtitles is a skill. After hundreds of hours Scandinavians don't seem to have this kind of problem. At least when the goal is not to read all of the subs, but to understand what is going on.

But Scottish Gaelic speakers do. Native speakers complain about the English subtitles on TV because they can't help but read them, even though they've been speaking Gaelic since birth. And you can check this yourself -- if you switch on native subtitles on TV programmes in you native language, you'll most likely have to concentrate to stop yourself reading them. This has been observed in scientific studies. Writing forces you to read.

5. so what? if you find yourself just reading, you go back. or you just skip ahead because LR takes lots of hours anyway. btw with L2/L3 I find it easier not to read ahead of the audio.

Two things:
1) It's suboptimal to do something that encourages incorrect behaviour, then start doing that behaviour, then have to go back and correct it.
2) Effort makes learning harder -- it distracts from the real goal of learning. Many people give up language learning out of frustration, so we should be encouraging techniques that don't frustrate.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Have you ever tried spliting it into chapters instead of LR`ing a whole book at once?

OK, I've only done LR for about one hour at a time (or the duration of an audiobook CD), never a whole audiobook in one sitting. Some activities work best after you've reached a certain "momentum", and for literature, a chapter here or there isn't really enough to get into the reading "flow", the author's style, the language itself... Somewhere in the original HTLAL thread, it was suggested that you get accustomed to idiolect after... what was it... 20 pages? By the first half (or less?) you've already encountered a lot (if not all) of the vocabulary in the book. I was about to try intense LR-ing earlier this year but life came in the way. Not everyone can devote up to ten hours per day for three-four consecutive days.

[tarvos]

My main disagreement is really with your trust in research. I trust in HTLAL and the members' experiences are much more relevant to me.

Honestly, I think you're committing an error here. The reason research is accepted is because it's peer-reviewed and controlled and therefore has inbuilt correction mechanisms in case people make mistakes (which, for better or worse, we do). I am much more inclined to trust peer-reviewed scientific articles on learning than I'm inclined to trust people's subjective experiences directly. The reasoning you apply is the same reason people still think vaccines and autism are linked, because they rely on anecdotal evidence (and a paper which was retracted).

The value of HTLAL is in the sum of all people's experiences and distilling trends through the logs of single users, rather than any anecdotal evidence on its own, and even then we may neglect to log many of the actual things we do when we are learning. If you trust in HTLAL, trust in the volume and combined experiences of people's logs, rather than single, individual stories which are inherently biased. A good appraisal of effective language techniques has to take this kind of plurality into account, and by setting more store in individual experiences and reports you're simply locking yourself out of a frame of comparison.

There's a reason scientists are so strict about what goes into articles and what gets thrown by the wayside. And that is because experiences are a great talking point, but they're not truly falsifiable evidence in the same way that using the scientific method to evaluate methods is.

The fact that the classroom is not a tool you favour doesn't invalidate the research techniques. Perhaps it says something about your disposition towards classrooms, or perhaps it says that more research needs to be done on situations outside the classroom, but it says rather little about the value of the actual research, because unless you're going to try and debate the rigorous methodology used, you're in much murkier water than you think.

About LR: I'd rather just read or listen, not do both at the same time. Focusing on one activity is hard enough. Doing both at the same time with the same language usually still leads to me reading more than listening, because I can cover more ground using the written word.