blaurebell wrote:Cainntear wrote:I've met lots of people who've gone through grammar-heavy courses and can do all the tasks, but fail in real production because while they can produce the grammar on demand from the teacher/book/CD/website, they can't do it when they're speaking. What is the problem here if it is not the failure to link the form with the meaning?
Again, totally agreed. To be honest that's due to "cheating" though. Connecting form and meaning is difficult, so the automatic tendency is to make things easier. It's not really the fault of the course designers if the students find a way of not using their brains properly. After all, supposedly they want to learn, right? There should be an initial paragraph in every workbook that tells learners to *think* about every single sentence, about the possible context, the reason why a drill is useful and so on. A bit silly that it needs to be said, but well. The path of least resistance is probably always the wrong path in language learning.
If by "cheating" you mean "being human", I agree.
Because the human brain has evolved to identify patterns and determine the simplest way of thinking about something.
In the real world, you get real stimulus and real response, and your brain connects the stimulus, your response, and the feedback you receive on it.
Once you go into a classroom, the danger is that differences from the natural environment mean that the relationship between stimulus, response and feedback is different, and as soon as that feedback is different, what you learn changes.
In a simplistic form, this is the justification for so-called "natural" and "communicative" approaches to language learning, but it's more complicated than that, because even natural and communicative classrooms are unnatural.
Cainntear wrote: Completely production + interaction based approaches definitely work, that's also my experience. In fact the only things that worked for me were interaction based approaches and Assimil + Duolingo + intensive reading. The problem with interaction approaches is that one can really develop some nasty habits though by constantly trying to communicate at a level beyond the actual production capabilities - and that's the tendency because we are adults who have speaking needs beyond "I want milk".
Yes, I agree that communicative and task-based approaches are weak, for precisely those reasons. But production doesn't actually have to mean interaction. I don't imagine you've ever used a Michel Thomas course (they're marketed to English speakers) but what he does is translation based on production.
While winging more difficult to say things in Tarzan Speak it's totally possible to develop such deeply ingrained mistakes that they are nearly impossible to correct later on. My mum makes some pretty obvious mistakes in German in some of her most commonly used standard sentences. She got in the habit of saying them before she could figure out that there are mistakes in them and she might not even make the same mistakes in any of her "new" sentences. I spent some of my teenage years trying to correct her, but it made no difference. Habits are just so difficult to modify! The mistakes become like grooves and we always fall into them, because we reinforce them every time we make them. That's why I never repeated my full immersion from zero experiment after Spanish. I feel like it left a mark, even though I can communicate fluently in everyday situations without much difficulty. The bad habits and gaps become pretty obvious during longer conversations though.
Comprehension with interaction based approaches comes pretty naturally, definitely, but probably at a slower pace and with far wider gaps than if you take the Assimil + intensive reading route. I've only done interaction + listening + extensive reading with Spanish and I feel like my comprehension now lacks precision, especially with literary language. Assimil + intensive reading is a pretty cool short cut for quick and precise comprehension in my opinion, especially for languages where you're unlikely to communicate much. Otherwise the "easy way out" with this one is to never even do the active wave and ignore the production side altogether. Definitely the case with my French, although my comprehension is at a good level there even with very literary language. I'm fine with that for now because I don't really need to speak it at the moment, but my production lags really super far behind with this one.
The best path is probably one that combines a few very different approaches and combines all their strengths. Assimil + intensive reading + listening, followed by FSI, followed by lots of focused interaction maybe? But then, it really depends on what the learner needs and likes to know how to start. I need to have fun with a language early on and communicating in Tarzan speak isn't fun for me, I'm too much of a perfectionist with anxiety issues for that
I prefer to read and watch movies. People who don't care much for that kind of engagement with a language - surprisingly many - will do best with early interaction, but probably need to take special care to drill more to counteract possible pervasive early mistakes. Grammar nerds will love FSI of course, but it's probably a bad first course for the vast majority of learners.
Have a look at the following, which is a little under three minutes from the advanced French course.
Michel Thomas Advanced French wrote:]I don't know where it is je ne sais pas où c'est
I don't know what it is je ne sais pas ce que c'est
to explain éxpliquer
can you explain to me what it is? pouvez-vous m'éxpliquer ce que c'est?
what do you want? qu'est-ce que vous voulez?
what do you want to do? qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire?
what do you want to say? qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire?
what do you mean? qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire?
I don't understand what you mean je ne comprends pas ce que vous voulez dire
can explain to me what you mean? pouvez-vous m'éxpliquer ce que vous voulez dire?
that's not what I mean ce n'est pas ce que je veux dire
what do you mean? qu'est-ce que vous-voulez dire?
it means ça veut dire
what does it mean? qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?
I don't understand what it means je ne comprends pas ce que ça veut dire
I want je veux
I'm going je vais
I want it je le veux
I don't want it je ne le veux pas
I want some, I want some of it j'en veux
I don't want any je n'en veux pas
that's not what I mean ce n'est pas ce que je veux dire
I don't know what it means je ne sais pas ce que ça veut dire
I know of no other course that provides that much variety and diversity in such a short space of time. Notice how different each prompt/response is from the last. If you think about changing "variables" in a sentence, most consecutive exercises differ by several variables (although some do by only one, eg qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire). Also, there's only one point where three consecutive responses differ by a single variable: qu'est-ce que vous voulez faire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire -> qu'est-ce que vous voulez dire. Even that is arguably more complex than that because we're switching the verb in the native language prompt (want to say -> mean) for a different meaning but where the target language response is the same.
Sorry for the lengthy rambling half rant, but this actually annoys me a lot. There must be some way of taking the drudgery out of drills beyond gamification!
Yup, and the answer is variety and complexity. As long as tasks are repetitive, they will be boring. They will be boring because they allow meaningless mechanical processing. Variety and complexity force you to think, and stop the mechanical grind.
Now you might think that the problems with interactional lessons (e.g. the communicative approach) show that complexity is bad, they don't -- they just prove that there's no point using complex examples if the student hasn't acquired the complex rules underlying them.