Language: redundancy, accuracy and acquisition

[Cainntear]

A couple of threads recently have brought up ideas about silent periods vs talking from day 1, so I thought I'd start a new thread to try and focus the discussion slightly in one direction.

Here's a couple of quotes from one thread:

Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.

I do think a long phase of mostly passive work is useful. I see so many people here rushing to speak ASAP and ending up speaking terrible Chinese in a horrible accent.

I'm never quite sure that shows anything -- correlation is not causation, and I've met more learners with terrible language and terrible accents than I've ever met with good ones, and I've never seen any evidence of one particular school of thought resulting in better long-term acquisition, although people claim that for pretty much every one of them. I also believe I've got good results in most of my languages and I've always focused on production early on.

My accent in Italian isn't great (Italians often actually think I'm Spanish) and Italian is the only language I've learned without any real conscious thought about pronunciation (except consonant gemination, which even now I have to think about). I'd say I've spent a lot less time on Italian than any other language, but the lack of conscious pronunciation work is the biggest difference from what I usually do.

I think the "speak first!" "no listen first!" "no read first!" argument is the wrong way of looking at it.

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it another thousand times before I die: language is redundant, which means you rarely have to be accurate to be understood, and you can understand a piece of language without noticing all the details.

For example, if a foreign guy was to tell me he went somewhere "in the bus", I would understand him. Conversely, if I told him I'd gone somewhere "on the bus", he wouldn't need to notice that I'd used the preposition "on" instead of "in" and he could simply understand it as "on the bus" and never notice I'd said anything different. So neither "speaking" or "listening" leads to correct grammar.

It's also the same with pronunciation, because there are very few minimal pairs that can't be disambiguated from context.

There's a lot of talk in the second language literature about "noticing" -- the students that are most successful in immersive settings seem to be the ones that are consciously aware of the language they're hearing and repeating. The students that are most successful in classes based on parroting seem to be those who are thinking about the components of the phrases they're repeating. There's also the notion that "focus-on-form", activities which require direct attention to wordforms and grammatical patterns while also dealing with meaning, consistently appears to be a feature of successful learners and effective classrooms.

It may be my own confirmation bias, but as I recall it, I've seen various papers giving figures to support the notion that conscious thought is required throughout the early stages of the process to learn a language well, and all I've seen arguing the other way is philosophising and assertions without evidence.

I believe early speaking is successful if you are speaking something that's a good approximation of "correct" from day one, and early listening is successful if you're able to pay attention to the details well and build up a notion of "correct".

However, I think the problem is that a great many teachers and course writers have a philosophy of "survival first, accuracy later", and whatever your mode of learning, if you're using shortcuts instead of learning the underlying mechanics of the language, then you simply aren't learning the language. You'll learn yourself into a dead end, boxed in by all the mistakes you've collected on the way.

Self-teachers often fall into this same trap of "survival first", often because it seems logical to serve your immediate needs, but also because as someone who doesn't know the language, it's hard for you to lead yourself to accuracy. (Which is where I feel that my admittedly limited study of linguistics helps me -- I'm much better able to understand a grammar book or a pronunciation guide than I was before the course, so I can get a fairly good idea of what is correct and accurate, and if I feel an explanation in a book is not telling me the whole story, I know the sort of things I need to look up the fuller answer.) This is one of the reasons I think a good teacher or tutor is worth the expense -- someone who knows what accuracy is can teach you it.

So my view, partly arising from my opinions but supported by a lot of literature, is that noticing and focus-on-form are the most important factors in success as a learner whatever the mode and medium of learning.

My personal extension to that is that I believe accuracy can only really be reliably practiced in spoken production, because many tasks in listening, writing and reading can all be accomplished seemingly successfully without necessarily needing to be completely accurate and notice everything.

[Random Review]

A couple of threads recently have brought up ideas about silent periods vs talking from day 1, so I thought I'd start a new thread to try and focus the discussion slightly in one direction.

Here's a couple of quotes from one thread:

Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.

I do think a long phase of mostly passive work is useful. I see so many people here rushing to speak ASAP and ending up speaking terrible Chinese in a horrible accent.

I'm never quite sure that shows anything -- correlation is not causation, and I've met more learners with terrible language and terrible accents than I've ever met with good ones, and I've never seen any evidence of one particular school of thought resulting in better long-term acquisition, although people claim that for pretty much every one of them. I also believe I've got good results in most of my languages and I've always focused on production early on.

My accent in Italian isn't great (Italians often actually think I'm Spanish) and Italian is the only language I've learned without any real conscious thought about pronunciation (except consonant gemination, which even now I have to think about). I'd say I've spent a lot less time on Italian than any other language, but the lack of conscious pronunciation work is the biggest difference from what I usually do.

I think the "speak first!" "no listen first!" "no read first!" argument is the wrong way of looking at it.

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it another thousand times before I die: language is redundant, which means you rarely have to be accurate to be understood, and you can understand a piece of language without noticing all the details.

For example, if a foreign guy was to tell me he went somewhere "in the bus", I would understand him. Conversely, if I told him I'd gone somewhere "on the bus", he wouldn't need to notice that I'd used the preposition "on" instead of "in" and he could simply understand it as "on the bus" and never notice I'd said anything different. So neither "speaking" or "listening" leads to correct grammar.

It's also the same with pronunciation, because there are very few minimal pairs that can't be disambiguated from context.

There's a lot of talk in the second language literature about "noticing" -- the students that are most successful in immersive settings seem to be the ones that are consciously aware of the language they're hearing and repeating. The students that are most successful in classes based on parroting seem to be those who are thinking about the components of the phrases they're repeating. There's also the notion that "focus-on-form", activities which require direct attention to wordforms and grammatical patterns while also dealing with meaning, consistently appears to be a feature of successful learners and effective classrooms.

It may be my own confirmation bias, but as I recall it, I've seen various papers giving figures to support the notion that conscious thought is required throughout the early stages of the process to learn a language well, and all I've seen arguing the other way is philosophising and assertions without evidence.

I believe early speaking is successful if you are speaking something that's a good approximation of "correct" from day one, and early listening is successful if you're able to pay attention to the details well and build up a notion of "correct".

However, I think the problem is that a great many teachers and course writers have a philosophy of "survival first, accuracy later", and whatever your mode of learning, if you're using shortcuts instead of learning the underlying mechanics of the language, then you simply aren't learning the language. You'll learn yourself into a dead end, boxed in by all the mistakes you've collected on the way.

Self-teachers often fall into this same trap of "survival first", often because it seems logical to serve your immediate needs, but also because as someone who doesn't know the language, it's hard for you to lead yourself to accuracy. (Which is where I feel that my admittedly limited study of linguistics helps me -- I'm much better able to understand a grammar book or a pronunciation guide than I was before the course, so I can get a fairly good idea of what is correct and accurate, and if I feel an explanation in a book is not telling me the whole story, I know the sort of things I need to look up the fuller answer.) This is one of the reasons I think a good teacher or tutor is worth the expense -- someone who knows what accuracy is can teach you it.

So my view, partly arising from my opinions but supported by a lot of literature, is that noticing and focus-on-form are the most important factors in success as a learner whatever the mode and medium of learning.

My personal extension to that is that I believe accuracy can only really be reliably practiced in spoken production, because many tasks in listening, writing and reading can all be accomplished seemingly successfully without necessarily needing to be completely accurate and notice everything.

Actually I agree with all of this TBH.

My own (compromise) approach (which worked well for my German pronunciation) I think of as "study the phonology and then input + protected output". The jury is still out on whether this will be successful for Chinese. My pronunciation and tones are not as good as I would like them to be; but I am consistently told they are much better than most foreigners. More tellingly (since people often say what they think you want to hear), I have had native Chinese (such as taxi drivers) express real frustration when I don't understand them, saying things like (but you can speak Chinese, why can't you understand me). The best test is that taxi drivers understand my address first time, which is not the case with my roommate (or my previous roommate) or indeed the general experience of foreigners in this city. So my pronunciation is clearly OK if not great. It is a base I can improve on.

Protected output I classify as output that is in some way protected from practicing errors. In the early stages only limiting yourself to single words and very short sentences immediately before hearing the audio to compare and check might qualify (and even this assumes you have studied and can now hear the phonemic differences that don't exist in your language). Later stages might include Pimsleur and then later still repeating with comprehension (passive) or generating (active) sentences from a course book such as Assimil and shadowing (which is where I'm currently at with the help of Anki). At all stages this can include speaking with a teacher who is instructed to correct every error (if you can find one ).

That's my approach, which is basically inspired by trying to see the common ground between ALG and the Arthur Cotton method and the "study the phonology first" bit I got from you and another poster on here (I think maybe Crush?).

Regarding the part of your post that I have bolded, I totally agree; but I would add that learners are also harmed by what I call "the rush to fluency". The course maps we follow for young children continually build on pronunciation and basic grammar that have been imperfectly mastered, leading to older children who speak fluent English with mediocre (strong students) or bad (weaker students) pronunciation and basic grammar mistakes. I have seen this where I work. The reason is simple: parents demand it. They can't hear these basic mistakes; but they can (and do) constantly ask when their child will be fluent or how many words they have learned so far. It's quite tragic IMO.

The value in a silent period is in the "first do no harm" principle IMO. It is incredibly slow, possibly inefficient, but it doesn't harm your L2 they way bad output practice does.

[reineke]

"Processing Instruction, an edited volume by Bill VanPatten, comprises five parts that branch out into 17 chapters.

At the outset let me recommend this volume to all SLA researchers and practitioners who are looking for the next big theoretical undertaking that also has insights for the classroom.

In Part I, Foundations, VanPatten presents several publications authored by him and others that describe and discuss input processing and processing instruction (PI). Tracing the roots of the processing principles paradigm to work in child L1 acquisition, he also briefly touches on what he considers to be the greatest challenge to PI: how to apply L1 models of parsing to the L2 context. Whereas the L1 models are concerned with ambiguity resolution, he points out that it is not at all clear how the parsing mechanism can explicate acquisition processes for L2 context.

In Input Processing in Second Language Acquisition (Chapter 1), VanPatten sets out to define input processing as the conditions under which learners may attempt to make connections between form in the input and meaning. He also postulates that learners, because of working memory constraints and because they are paying attention to prosodic cues (that signal content or more meaningful words than functors), are only able to process input for meaning before they can process it for form. This he calls the Primacy of Meaning Principle. This principle comprises five sub-principles: Learners process content before anything else (The Primacy of Content Words Principle), rely on lexical words to encode meaning as opposed to grammatical forms that indicate the same semantic information (The Lexical Preference Principle), are more likely to process non-redundant meaningful grammatical forms before processing redundant meaningful grammatical forms (The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle), are more likely to process meaningful grammatical forms before non-meaningful forms, irrespective of redundancy (The Meaning-before-Nonmeaning Principle), must not face a drain of attentional resources while processing sentential meaning before processing either redundant meaningful or nonmeaningful forms (The Availability of Resources Principle), and tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in medial and final positions (The Sentence Location Principle). Related to the principles above are learners' tendency to process the first noun or pronoun in a sentence as the subject / agent (The First Noun Principle). This in turn comprises three sub-principles: learners' tendency to rely on lexical semantics rather than word order to process sentences (The Lexical Semantics Principle), relying on event probabilities rather than on word order (The Event Probabilities Principle) relying less on the first noun principle if preceding context constrains the possible interpretation of a clause or sentence (The Contextual Constraint Principle). However, VanPatten points out that none of these principles operates in isolation; sometimes several may act together or one may take precedence over another, and sometimes several "may collude" to delay acquisition.

Chapter 2 - The Nature of Processing Instruction by Wynne Wong, sets out the three characteristics of Processing Instruction (PI), which she defines as "a type of focus on form instruction,"thus:
explicit information about the target structure
explicit information about processing strategies
structured input activities
Wong then goes on to describe how to develop Structured Input (SI) activities. She points out that without first identifying a processing problem (which will enable learners to drop their less than optimal strategies for efficient ones), it will not be possible to create SI activities that will help the learner reach the goal. The other guidelines for developing SI activities follow:
Present one thing at a time (which will not drain learners' resources)
Keep meaning in focus (which means that acquisition of grammatical items will only happen if learners are required to process propositional content)
Move from sentences to connected discourse
Use both oral and written input (so that more "visual" learners would benefit from seeing written input)
Have learners do something with the input (a reason for attending to the input)
Keep the learner's processing strategies in mind (For example, "if learners are relying on lexical items to interpret tense, then we may want to structure the activities so that learners are pushed to rely on grammatical morphemes instead of lexical adverbs to get tense").
She also describes the two types of SI activities used in PI: referential--those activities that require learners to pay attention to form in order to get meaning and which have a right or wrong answer--and affective activities--those activities that require learners to express an opinion or belief, but do not have right or wrong answers.

In Chapter 3, Commentary: What to teach? How to teach? Patsy M. Lightbown focuses on research she and her colleagues carried out with 11 and 12-year-old francophone children enrolled in intensive ESL classes. They found that neither did intensive exposure to meaning-focused English help the subjects to invert questions forms nor did it allow use of the possessive determiners his and her which French learners of English understand as the determiner agreeing not with the natural gender of the possessor but with the grammatical gender of the possessed entity (e.g., The little girl talks to his father.).
Again, these learners accepted subject-auxiliary verb inversion with pronouns (e.g., Can we watch television?) but not with full lexical nouns (*Why fish can live in water?) which was thought to happen because of the low salience of the auxiliary in the inversion and which learners sometimes heard as 'the' in the input.

Michael Harrington's Commentary: Input Processing as a Theory of Processing Input (Chapter 4) levels several charges at IP. According to him, the notion of meaning used in the IP model was difficult to operationalize and test as is also the model's claim that learners find it difficult to pay attention to certain forms at the initial encoding of the form-meaning connection rather than the earlier perceptual stage or the later storage and retrieval stages. His next charge is that whereas the principles (principles 1 and 1a) are couched in categorical terms, the sub-principles are couched in probabilistic terms. Another serious charge has to do with the third person -s in for example, He eats the apple. He states that the redundancy of the -s becomes apparent to the comprehender only when they understand that both he and -s share the feature "a person talked about but not face-to-face" (pp. 88-89). To Harrington, at the initial stages of learning when the learner does not know the form the -s would not be realized as redundant. "

http://tesl-ej.org/ej35/r5.html

"My intention is to separate “noticing” from “metalinguistic awareness” as clearly as possible, by assuming that the objects of attention and noticing are elements of the surface structure of utterances in the input, instances of language, rather than any abstract rules or principles of which such instances may be exemplars. Although statements about learners “noticing [i.e., becoming aware of] the structural regularities of a language” are perfectly fine in ordinary language, these imply comparisons across instances and metalinguistic reflection (thinking about what has been attended and noticed, forming hypotheses, and so forth), much more than is implied by the restricted sense of noticing used here."
Schmidt, Attention, p. 5
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/PDFs/SCHMIDT%20attention.pdf

Noticing and second language acquisition: Studies in honor of Richard Schmidt

"This volume celebrates the life and groundbreaking work of Richard Schmidt, the developer of the influential Noticing Hypothesis in the field of second language acquisition. The 19 chapters encompass a compelling collection of cutting­edge research studies exploring such constructs as noticing, attention, and awareness from multiple perspectives, which expand, fine tune, sometimes support, and sometimes challenge Schmidt’s seminal ideas and take research on noticing in exciting new directions."

Chapter 4
Attention, Awareness, and Noticing in Language Processing and Learning | John N. Williams

This chapter reviews current psychological and applied linguistic research that is relevant to Schmidt’s landmark theoretical analysis of the concepts of attention, conscious awareness, and noticing. Recent evidence that attention and awareness are dissociable makes it possible to ask which of these constructs is required for either processing familiar stimuli or learning novel associations. There is good evidence for processing familiar stimuli without conscious awareness and even without attention. There is mounting evidence for learning without awareness at the level of understanding regularities, particularly when meaning is involved (semantic implicit learning). There is even some recent evidence for learning without awareness at the level of noticing form...Thus, whilst attention does appear to be necessary for learning, awareness might not be[/b]. It is suggested that future research should probe the types of regularity that can be learned without awareness and that this will shed more light on the nature of the underlying learning mechanism and permit an evaluation of its relevance to SLA."

http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/publications/view/MG09/

[reineke]

[reineke]

The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension.

Abstract

When participants search for a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss more instances if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This phenomenon, called the missing-letter effect, has been considered a window on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the visual processing of written language. In the present study, one group of participants read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter, and another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter's corresponding phoneme. The ubiquitous missing-letter effect was replicated and extended to a missing-phoneme effect Item-based correlations between the reading and listening tasks were high, which led us to conclude that both tasks involve cognitive processes that reading and listening have in common and that both processes are rooted in psycholinguistically driven allocation of attention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27154551

[Cavesa]

I partially agree, even though I am convinced about a significant part of fossilised mistakes comes from trying to perform better than what we've got a foundation for. I can see it on myself and on others and I think there were some articles about this linked on the forums in past (but I don't have much trust for those anyways). I am not for a silent period at all costs and I've already heard incompetent teachers argument with it instead of just apologizing for doing a crappy job for the money (nope, I don't believe those children are just going through five years of a silent period, having language classes at least twice a week). But I think that working on some aspects faster than on others, specifically trying to understand the system before learning mistakes, is not wrong at all.

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it another thousand times before I die: language is redundant, which means you rarely have to be accurate to be understood, and you can understand a piece of language without noticing all the details.

For example, if a foreign guy was to tell me he went somewhere "in the bus", I would understand him. Conversely, if I told him I'd gone somewhere "on the bus", he wouldn't need to notice that I'd used the preposition "on" instead of "in" and he could simply understand it as "on the bus" and never notice I'd said anything different. So neither "speaking" or "listening" leads to correct grammar.

It's also the same with pronunciation, because there are very few minimal pairs that can't be disambiguated from context.

You are right. But that doesn't mean people shouldn't strive for learning the language well. This attitude leads exactly to crappy level and getting stuck. This is an important attitude behind the fact that the international language is broken heavily accented B1/B2 English. That's why I really dislike all those "just speak and speak" kinds of advice.

It may be my own confirmation bias, but as I recall it, I've seen various papers giving figures to support the notion that conscious thought is required throughout the early stages of the process to learn a language well, and all I've seen arguing the other way is philosophising and assertions without evidence.

This is a logical assumption. Even though I'd be curious about the methods used in such papers.

However, I think the problem is that a great many teachers and course writers have a philosophy of "survival first, accuracy later", and whatever your mode of learning, if you're using shortcuts instead of learning the underlying mechanics of the language, then you simply aren't learning the language. You'll learn yourself into a dead end, boxed in by all the mistakes you've collected on the way.[

Self-teachers often fall into this same trap of "survival first", often because it seems logical to serve your immediate needs, but also because as someone who doesn't know the language, it's hard for you to lead yourself to accuracy. (Which is where I feel that my admittedly limited study of linguistics helps me -- I'm much better able to understand a grammar book or a pronunciation guide than I was before the course, so I can get a fairly good idea of what is correct and accurate, and if I feel an explanation in a book is not telling me the whole story, I know the sort of things I need to look up the fuller answer.) This is one of the reasons I think a good teacher or tutor is worth the expense -- someone who knows what accuracy is can teach you it.

I wholeheartedly agree the "survival first" strategy is a disaster. And it is everywhere. It leads to French beginners being convinced that the language is illogical and purely memorisation (and therefore horrible to learn), because they start with survival sentences including tons of grammar. And to confused Duolingo users complaining on the forums that a basic feature was introduced too late, five skills from the start, which is a tragedy because you cannot speak without it. And lots of other pieces of the puzzle, that turns language learning in a less efficient endeavour.

Teachers and tutors are a big part of the problem. Just like there are more "survival focused" and more "real learning focused" courses, the same is true about the teachers and tutors. Vast majority of them is now turning to the "survival" style, because that is the trend. People are more likely to pay for "conversation oriented lessons you can immediately use in the real life" than for "slowly building up the real ability to freely use a language". While a good teacher is worth the expense, they are extremely hard to find in the ocean of crappy ones.

However, I disagree that accuracy comes only from speaking. Actually, speaking is an activity that goes on too fast for the accuracy (I often realize a mistake one second too late, as it has already left my mouth). All those tasks you mention require as much accuracy as you want them to require. If you do just the coursebookish listening activities with primitive questions, of course you don't need accuracy. If you challenge yourself to understanding completely, it is a different activity. Also, those inaccurate activities (like extensive reading and listening) can lead to accuracy, if you get exposed to the accurate content for long enough.

Regarding the part of your post that I have bolded, I totally agree; but I would add that learners are also harmed by what I call "the rush to fluency". The course maps we follow for young children continually build on pronunciation and basic grammar that have been imperfectly mastered, leading to older children who speak fluent English with mediocre (strong students) or bad (weaker students) pronunciation and basic grammar mistakes. I have seen this where I work. The reason is simple: parents demand it. They can't hear these basic mistakes; but they can (and do) constantly ask when their child will be fluent or how many words they have learned so far. It's quite tragic IMO.

The value in a silent period is in the "first do no harm" principle IMO. It is incredibly slow, possibly inefficient, but it doesn't harm your L2 they way bad output practice does.

I love the term "the rush to fluency"! You are right that people skip the basics or go through them too superficially. But as I have been watching the children language teaching for years (and comparing it to my own old fashioned but much more efficient experience ages ago), I think there are two points you underestimate. The parents require "fluency" and such stuff, yes. But they are not forcing the teachers to follow horrible coursebooks with very little content and very superficial coverage of anything. And the silent period is heavily advocated by lots of teachers.

Which leads to a bit of a paradox. You have children, who have been learning the langauge for several years, a few hours per week. And they somehow happen to officially be in the silent period (no or almost no output practice) AND not to get the strong theoretical base they need at the same time (as there is almost no grammar and little vocabulary in their coursebook, which however prides itself in being made in Cambridge or Oxford). So, they are getting the disadvantages of both.

And this extends to the adult learners too sometimes. But those at least tend to demand the advantages of one of the two options.

[Random Review]

Regarding the part of your post that I have bolded, I totally agree; but I would add that learners are also harmed by what I call "the rush to fluency". The course maps we follow for young children continually build on pronunciation and basic grammar that have been imperfectly mastered, leading to older children who speak fluent English with mediocre (strong students) or bad (weaker students) pronunciation and basic grammar mistakes. I have seen this where I work. The reason is simple: parents demand it. They can't hear these basic mistakes; but they can (and do) constantly ask when their child will be fluent or how many words they have learned so far. It's quite tragic IMO.

The value in a silent period is in the "first do no harm" principle IMO. It is incredibly slow, possibly inefficient, but it doesn't harm your L2 they way bad output practice does.

I love the term "the rush to fluency"! You are right that people skip the basics or go through them too superficially. But as I have been watching the children language teaching for years (and comparing it to my own old fashioned but much more efficient experience ages ago), I think there are two points you underestimate. The parents require "fluency" and such stuff, yes. But they are not forcing the teachers to follow horrible coursebooks with very little content and very superficial coverage of anything. And the silent period is heavily advocated by lots of teachers.

Which leads to a bit of a paradox. You have children, who have been learning the langauge for several years, a few hours per week. And they somehow happen to officially be in the silent period (no or almost no output practice) AND not to get the strong theoretical base they need at the same time (as there is almost no grammar and little vocabulary in their coursebook, which however prides itself in being made in Cambridge or Oxford). So, they are getting the disadvantages of both.

And this extends to the adult learners too sometimes. But those at least tend to demand the advantages of one of the two options.

I'm not necessarily a massive fan of the silent period TBH, mate. I'm definitely a fan of not forcing people to speak before they are ready, but that is something else. I've only worked for two companies, so maybe it isn't general; but I definitely have had to follow a course map that moves too fast both times.

The most sensible view I ever read was Arthur Cotton's: which can be paraphrased for modern readers as "don't try to learn to produce more than your attentional system can cope with at a given time or you will learn it badly. By constantly moving on to the next unit, which has more complex grammar and more vocabulary, you don't give students any real chance of processing small grammar words and endings or small phonetic details, because their attention system is working flat out just to process what they are hearing and producing for meaning. I'm not a big fan of i+1 at beginning levels. It is a good approach, actually even a very good approach, for someone who has mastered how the language basically works (for example grammatically or phonetically) and wants to expand their ability to communicate; it is not a good way to learn how a new language fits together.

A silent period doesn't harm in this way. I don't say I like it. I definitely think we should be aiming much higher than that; but for God's sake at the very least don't permanently damage the L2 of the children by constantly and cumulatively forcing them to produce more than they can competently do.

[reineke]

Teachers and tutors are a big part of the problem.

While a good teacher is worth the expense, they are extremely hard to find in the ocean of crappy ones.

The parents require "fluency" and such stuff, yes. But they are not forcing the teachers to follow horrible coursebooks with very little content and very superficial coverage of anything. And the silent period is heavily advocated by lots of teachers.

Which leads to a bit of a paradox. You have children, who have been learning the langauge for several years, a few hours per week. And they somehow happen to officially be in the silent period (no or almost no output practice) AND not to get the strong theoretical base they need at the same time (as there is almost no grammar and little vocabulary in their coursebook, which however prides itself in being made in Cambridge or Oxford). So, they are getting the disadvantages of both.

And this extends to the adult learners too sometimes. But those at least tend to demand the advantages of one of the two options.

"In Japan, many college students believe that just sitting in the class is enough and that not doing homework is somehow 'getting one up' on the teacher who they know has to pass them anyway. The idea of learning English rather than studying it has yet to take off here."

"...Although most Japanese people do not need English, and 20 years from now they will not need English in their daily lives, I have met very few Japanese who would not like to be able to speak it. But the vast, vast majority are not willing to invest time, effort and energy to do so. Mostly because they don't need to. The unfaltering demand to learn English comes mostly from need or dreams.

Most people need English to pass a test, get a license, get a better job and to dream of one day being able to have conversations with people in English and understand movies in the original. Others feel that learning English gives them a form of escapism from their ordinary lives and gives them hope they will be able to leave Japan one day..."

http://www.eltnews.com/features/intervi ... aring.html

[Cavesa]

Teachers and tutors are a big part of the problem.

While a good teacher is worth the expense, they are extremely hard to find in the ocean of crappy ones.

The parents require "fluency" and such stuff, yes. But they are not forcing the teachers to follow horrible coursebooks with very little content and very superficial coverage of anything. And the silent period is heavily advocated by lots of teachers.

Which leads to a bit of a paradox. You have children, who have been learning the langauge for several years, a few hours per week. And they somehow happen to officially be in the silent period (no or almost no output practice) AND not to get the strong theoretical base they need at the same time (as there is almost no grammar and little vocabulary in their coursebook, which however prides itself in being made in Cambridge or Oxford). So, they are getting the disadvantages of both.

And this extends to the adult learners too sometimes. But those at least tend to demand the advantages of one of the two options.

"In Japan, many college students believe that just sitting in the class is enough and that not doing homework is somehow 'getting one up' on the teacher who they know has to pass them anyway. The idea of learning English rather than studying it has yet to take off here."

"...Although most Japanese people do not need English, and 20 years from now they will not need English in their daily lives, I have met very few Japanese who would not like to be able to speak it. But the vast, vast majority are not willing to invest time, effort and energy to do so. Mostly because they don't need to. The unfaltering demand to learn English comes mostly from need or dreams.

Most people need English to pass a test, get a license, get a better job and to dream of one day being able to have conversations with people in English and understand movies in the original. Others feel that learning English gives them a form of escapism from their ordinary lives and gives them hope they will be able to leave Japan one day..."

http://www.eltnews.com/features/intervi ... aring.html

I guess your point is "maybe the kids are just lazy spoilt brats and their parents just think the teachers are gonna do all the work".

Nope. It is impossible to work at the language outside the class in a manner that would have any connection to that class and expand on it (a thousand euro per semester is not that little). Sure, I could just teach it all myself with my own coursebooks, curriculum, and time, but then I want the teacher's money too (and they should have none for the crappy work) and I'd need someone to finish my studies for me. The main problem in "doing homework" and additional practice: even with all my experience, having looked up all the complementary material to the coursebooks, and having consulted the teachers in question several times, I still have no clue how to work further with the nothing that is being done in the "communicative" classes.

The children have IQ above average and would like to learn, they even take the initiative (they know really well the benefits of knowing the language). But it is impossible to determine what to work on with them. The coursebooks and workbooks are just collections of stupid pictures. The height of writing after five years is basically rewriting three sentences just with two changed words. There are no real hints on what grammar should be practiced. I found the wordlists for the coursebooks online after half an hour of trying, but those are not what the children are doing.

What are they doing in class: parroting "conversational" sentences. Yes, they get a bit of input, true. The teachers talk in English and they are native (which is their only quality). But they get no explanations, because it is a "communicative" teaching method, and they also get very little practice, because "they are in the silent period".

So no, my example is not about passive students

It is about the uncritical adoration of the "modern", "communicative", "practical" teaching methods. Of course the parents can be too trusting towards the teachers and you would probably hold that against them. But how on earth are monolinguals gonna check everything? And aren't they paying lots of money, so that they don't have to do it all themselves?

Fortunately, one of the two kids is already going to another school. The initial clash with reality was horrible. Suddenly, she doesn't have a native teacher and she isn't supposed to "learn by having fun" or "not feel any stress due to being forced to speak". But she gets the grammar and vocabulary lessons and can do the fun stuff (like reading) on her own. And she is finally able to make her own sentences. Who cares about a good accent "from the natives", when the student cannot say anything with it. The second kid is unfortunately still in the original school.

Which is one of the original Cainntear's points: the methods dogmatically avoiding explanation and focus on detail don't lead to good results.

[白田龍]

I suppose the silent period approach is mostly adopted by ppl who are not very interested in speaking in the first place. I'm learning languages I don't really expect to use at all, since I know no native speakers, and I don't have any plans for traveling either. I believe that after and indeterminate number of years, with enough exposition, my language processing mechanism will have matured enough that I may produce fluent grammatical speech, but even if it doesn't happen, I can't be bothered to practice speaking until phrases start coming out of my mouth on their own.