CarlyD wrote:I've read many papers and books about how people learn (non-language related.) Most of them seem to agree that different people take in and learn information in different ways--some can hear a lecture and learn it, another needs to take lots of notes and re-write them before it all sinks in, another needs to explain it back in their own words. None of the experts feel any of these people are wrong, just different in how they learn.
Ironically, the science supporting the existing of learning styles is
supposedly not very rigorous.
The report, authored by a team of eminent researchers in the psychology of learning—Hal Pashler (University of San Diego), Mark McDaniel (Washington University in St. Louis), Doug Rohrer (University of South Florida), and Robert Bjork (University of California, Los Angeles)—reviews the existing literature on learning styles and finds that although numerous studies have purported to show the existence of different kinds of learners (such as “auditory learners” and “visual learners”), those studies have not used the type of randomized research designs that would make their findings credible.
Nearly all of the studies that purport to provide evidence for learning styles fail to satisfy key criteria for scientific validity. Any experiment designed to test the learning-styles hypothesis would need to classify learners into categories and then randomly assign the learners to use one of several different learning methods, and the participants would need to take the same test at the end of the experiment. If there is truth to the idea that learning styles and teaching styles should mesh, then learners with a given style, say visual-spatial, should learn better with instruction that meshes with that style. The authors found that of the very large number of studies claiming to support the learning-styles hypothesis, very few used this type of research design. Of those that did, some provided evidence flatly contradictory to this meshing hypothesis, and the few findings in line with the meshing idea did not assess popular learning-style schemes.
That sounds complicated, but it's pretty simple. If you want to say that learning styles are real, first you need some way to classify students into different styles. Then you need to try different teaching techniques with each group of students. Do the students classified as auditory learners
actually do better when taught using auditory techniques? You can find
the full paper here, which says that, nope, as far as the authors could tell, you don't get better results by classifying students by learning style and then offering them a specialized curriculum. Which either means that we can't classify people by learning style, or that doing so doesn't appear to help.
Should you believe that paper? Well, that's a tricky question.
However, there are other factors worth considering. Maybe some students find certain approaches frustrating. For example, I
hate hate hate classic group audiolingual drills, and would rather stop learning languages entirely than do them. The
Rassias method drove me away from language learning for an entire decade. Similarly, I find it almost impossible to "shadow" the way
Alexander Arguelles suggests. This may be because I can't simultaneously repeat what I'm hearing in English (which means I could probably never be a simultaneous interpreter). But if I first listen to the audio enough times that it becomes an "earworm," then I can actually shadow it, and yes, it does help. So maybe certain students have a weird inability to apply certain techniques, or certain techniques make them profoundly miserable. And I'm not aware of any research that has been done on this, though I'm sure some exists. (I mean, we know that dyslexic students often learn better from audiobooks than the written word.)
I think the best approach to learning a new skill is to go find people who are good at it, and who take success for granted. Look for the people saying, "Oh, yeah, learning languages takes time, but it's not that hard, and pretty much anybody can do it. Here's how I did it." Or the people saying, "Bench pressing your own bodyweight isn't difficult with the right training program." Then pay attention to those people. You may find that those "experts" disagree. (Benny says speak from day 1! Khaztumoto says don't speak until it happens naturally! Krashen says read lots of books! Idahosa says
perfect your accent first!) So at that point, just pick an expert whose techniques seem agreeable, try them, and if they don't work, try another expert's techniques.
The important thing is to never ask advice from people who've
never succeeded, or who say it's impossible. Do not ask your monolingual coworkers what language course you should buy! How would they know?
Now, would it be a good thing if somebody would study language students from day one until "professional fluency", for thousands of language learners, and carefully measure the results? Yes! And the
FSI has done this. Ironically, they reached the following conclusion:
Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus.
Students at FSI and in other government language training programs have learned and still do learn languages successfully
from syllabi based on audio-lingual practice of grammatical patterns, linguistic functions, social situations, task-based learning, community language learning, the silent way, and combinations of these and other approaches. Spolsky (1989:383) writes, “Any intelligent and disinterested observer knows that there are many ways to learn languages and many ways to teach them, and that some ways work with some students in some circumstances and fail with others.” This matches our experience precisely.
It is also clear, as many have reported, that learners’ needs change over time—sometimes rapidly. Types of activities that worked very well for certain learners at an early stage in a course may be almost completely useless a couple of weeks later for those same learners (Larsen-Freeman 1991: 336–37). At the same time, the lesson plan that works beautifully for “Class B” on Monday morning may not work at all for a “Class C” that is at exactly the same stage in a course. Learning is more efficient when the focus is on providing each learner with what he or she needs in order to learn right now, not on teaching a preset curriculum.
Now, the FSI can pretty ruthless about teaching languages, and they are fully expected to produce specific levels of fluency very quickly. (ILR 3/3 in French in 24 weeks, starting from scratch, which is roughly equivalent to C1. That's absolutely amazing.) And they have a huge sample size.
So personally, I would listen very carefully to what the FSI says. Certainly their insights are more trustworthy that some study that involved 20 people studying a language for a total of 5 hours each. Here, the true experts aren't necessarily the people who study language acquisition at a university. They're the people who produce fluent speakers, reliably, on an industrial scale.
