Re: Listening vs Comprehension (and the case against TV) [interesting article]
Posted: Wed Apr 19, 2017 5:50 pm
My eyes glaze over reading a study of studies like this (no offense intended to NoManches). So often, as here, vast generalizations are made from studies that have never been replicated. Like that study of 2-minute listening sessions. One study? Seriously? (To be fair, the experimenters themselves perhaps did not do any generalizing.)
Anyway, the null hypothesis of such an endeavor would be something like, “No one ever learned a language from TV input alone.” I was going to say that Herr Mutzik, my first German professor, told us he learned English in his native Germany by watching American GI movies after WW2 (well, okay, that was not TV). It was a long time, he admitted, before he understood what “Cheese is Christ” meant. But even in this forum enough people have come forward offering examples of people learning a language from TV.
Null hypothesis disproved.
To the experimenters I say, please stop spending money to pad your CVs with all these dubious language studies and use it instead to prepare useful subtitles in the original language of movies and TV shows and transcripts as well in the original language. Then host them on a web site that is not a minefield of ads and malware. THAT's what will help language students.
Anyway, the null hypothesis of such an endeavor would be something like, “No one ever learned a language from TV input alone.” I was going to say that Herr Mutzik, my first German professor, told us he learned English in his native Germany by watching American GI movies after WW2 (well, okay, that was not TV). It was a long time, he admitted, before he understood what “Cheese is Christ” meant. But even in this forum enough people have come forward offering examples of people learning a language from TV.
Null hypothesis disproved.
To the experimenters I say, please stop spending money to pad your CVs with all these dubious language studies and use it instead to prepare useful subtitles in the original language of movies and TV shows and transcripts as well in the original language. Then host them on a web site that is not a minefield of ads and malware. THAT's what will help language students.