The limits of comprehensible input?

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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby Random Review » Tue Nov 20, 2018 11:20 am

DaveAgain wrote:
golyplot wrote:I think perhaps part of it is that English has a vast amount of obscure and archaic vocabulary, which native speakers pick up over time, but which isn't necessary for every day usage.

If I read something from the 19th century, I almost always encounter unfamiliar words, and I did a lot of reading as a kid (estimated vocabulary of 33k according to testyourvocab). The fantasy genre is also notorious for using words that are no longer in common usage in order to sound cool (which often leads to a revival in those words).
It's not just vocabulary.

In Part 4: What Everyone Should Know about Second Language Acquisition (7mins into video), the speaker gives an example from spanish where understanding of a particular sentence structure differs between native speakers over/under 14 years old.


Maybe. I would argue that this might not not really be a case of not understanding a particular sentence structure. If native adults go about 50/50, then it follows that both interpretations of this sentence structure are possible out of context. The question then becomes why the speaker is adding the optional overt subject in a particular context, (one possibility being to signal that the antecedent is not the subject of the main clause). For me this is pragmatics and there's nothing particularly surprising that even natives have to be teenagers to start to figure this out, because that is when most people start to get quite proficient at figuring out other people's intentions and stuff. It doesn't necessarily imply that it takes a long time to master the actual language point (although it might).

Interestingly IIRC written Spanish has devices to avoid this kind of unclear antecedent when necessary (e.g. éste and ése). I wonder why they are not often used in in informal speech. Thinking out loud, could it maybe be because these pronouns are also used colloquially (at least in Spain) to refer to someone in a disparaging manner? I remember a Spanish person being quite surprised when I showed him textbooks teaching "éste es el señor..." for "this is Mr...", advising me not to say this, because (while grammatically correct) it is quite disrespectful.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby Tristano » Sat Nov 24, 2018 8:59 pm

A lot of young Italian people have been raised from parents who heavily used a dialect, and although they can understand the dialect perfectly, they are unable to use it probably. This apply to me as well, my knowledge of the local variety of the Milanese dialect is so limited that I can't have a conversation in it. All I can do is to say some random sentence to make some crazy joke, especially when I want to recreate a rude farmer effect. This is very common in Italy. Also, the dialect is almost never written and is not taught at school. If I have to dialogue with a native Milanese speaker who doesn't speak Italian I would have no problem to understand and answer back in Italian and he would have no problem to understand Italian and reply in Milanese.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby frenkeld » Tue Dec 04, 2018 5:15 pm

zKing wrote:Edit: I also wanted to say that I think Reading makes the noticing thing a little easier as all those little words are clearly on the page and easy to re-read, or to put it another way, it makes it harder (but not impossible) for the brain to ignore those little glue words and endings, etc. Which is why I believe massive free reading correlates so highly with language skill.

On reading for CI:

"Early literacy may compromise grammatical learning":

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-early-literacy-compromise-grammatical.html
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby StringerBell » Tue Dec 04, 2018 11:15 pm

frenkeld wrote:"Early literacy may compromise grammatical learning":

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-early-literacy-compromise-grammatical.html



I don't see anything that supports the conclusion they came to. I kept rereading this article thinking I was misunderstanding something, but still can't see from where they drew their conclusion:

The preliterate six-year-olds were better at learning grammatical relations than at learning nouns. Their score on grammatical relations was well above chance (64 percent correct), while their performance on nouns was at chance (50 percent correct).

The eight-year-olds were equally good at learning grammar and vocabulary, scoring above 65 percent correct in both sessions.

After only six months of reading instruction, the first graders showed the same pattern as the third graders.

The now literate six-year-olds performed equally well on grammatical relations (61 percent correct) and nouns (57 percent correct). As expected, their grammatical agreement advantage had disappeared after learning to read.

The researchers conclude that literacy affects the way children learn a new language, and may come at a cost. According to first author Naomi Havron and MPI's Limor Raviv, this finding has implications for second language teaching: Exposure to written input can help word learning, but may harm some aspects of grammar learning.




***So preliterate 6 year olds scored 64% correct on grammatical relations questions but then 6 months later they scored 61% correct on grammatical relations questions. This seems statistically insignificant to me. This experiment was done on an extremely small sample size (31 students) so this slight variation could have easily been caused by a few kids who didn't sleep well the night before or were hungry or otherwise distracted. I'm not seeing anything in these results that suggests learning how to read has a negative effect.

Additionally, the 8 year olds scored higher in both grammatical relations AND nouns than the 6 year olds, which would support the opposite conclusion; that reading leads a small improvement (again, they didn't score that much higher and it's still probably statistically insignificant). Even after 6 months of reading instruction, the 6 year olds were still lower in both areas compared to the 8 year olds.

If I had to draw conclusions from this, I'd say that before learning to read, children are slightly better at learning grammatical concepts than learning nouns. After learning to read, children improve slightly in both areas and their ability to learn nouns increases so that it is on the same level as their ability to learn grammatical concepts. However, there is no mention about how much, if any, explicit grammar teaching the 8 years olds had been exposed to, so it might not even be fair to use them as a comparison because there would be too many variables (reading proficiency level, # of hours of reading done, amount of explicit grammar instruction, etc...)

*As long as this doesn't take the thread off track, I'm curious to hear what others think about this.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby frenkeld » Tue Dec 04, 2018 11:58 pm

StringerBell wrote:*As long as this doesn't take the thread off track, I'm curious to hear what others think about this.

I am able to see the research article itself at this link https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs41809-018-0015-9 from home, so it is quite possible that others might too, should they wish to examine it.

My own interest in this topic is in the general question of how much CI should be in aural and how much in written form. I used to be a believer in the joys of reading, but at some point reineke persuaded me that listening is strongly preferred. Except that I don't particularly enjoy TV shows, so I got left with nothing, to the point of my language studies languishing for several years now.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby Iversen » Wed Dec 05, 2018 9:44 pm

Thanks for posting the link to the original article.

I think the crux of the matter lies in the expectations of the researchers:

Given that literacy affects unit size of processing, we predict that learning to read will lead to differences in the way children acquire certain aspects of the artificial language. In particular, we predict that preliterate children will be better at learning article-noun agreement (larger units) than at learning nouns (smaller units), while literate children will not, and might even show the opposite pattern.

OK, and then they came to the conclusion that they were right (as usual), but as Stringerbell has explained not because of their results.

Actually literacy at any stage (as a supplement to hearing the language in question spoken) should make it easier to observe grammatical patterns since you now also get them as visual input without the time limits of speech. The idea that budding readers only read small units may be true at the stage where you really can't read more than one word in one go, but then the logical goal should be to get past that stage as early as possible, and once that is achieved your chances of being able to deal with longer sequences should be better than with just speech to help you, where the words just fly past you and are lost in the mist of eternal oblivion, blocked by an unending avalanche of more babble.

So just learn to read as early as possible. I have been told by my mother that I could read the subtitles on my aunt's TV before I started school at the tender age of 6½, and I don't think I have been stumped in my grammatical development because of that.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby tarvos » Wed Dec 05, 2018 10:09 pm

I was able to read at four; this immensely helped with my English...
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby Serpent » Sat Dec 15, 2018 11:29 pm

frenkeld wrote:My own interest in this topic is in the general question of how much CI should be in aural and how much in written form. I used to be a believer in the joys of reading, but at some point reineke persuaded me that listening is strongly preferred. Except that I don't particularly enjoy TV shows, so I got left with nothing, to the point of my language studies languishing for several years now.
I just saw your posts. Great to see you here! :D
Have you seen the super challenge? It has enabled people to make some incredible progress.
I'm not a fan of TV shows either, with some exceptions like El tiempo entre costuras.
Have you tried audiobooks?

I personally think that massive reading can give you very good writing and thinking skills, but speaking skills are much easier to develop if you also do listening. But if you don't find listening motivating, it's better to read a lot than to do nothing.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby frenkeld » Sun Dec 16, 2018 7:35 pm

Serpent wrote:I just saw your posts. Great to see you here! :D

Thank you!

Have you seen the super challenge? It has enabled people to make some incredible progress.
I'm not a fan of TV shows either, with some exceptions like El tiempo entre costuras.
Have you tried audiobooks?

I personally think that massive reading can give you very good writing and thinking skills, but speaking skills are much easier to develop if you also do listening. But if you don't find listening motivating, it's better to read a lot than to do nothing.

I will look up the super challenge. As for TV shows, I think I will bite the bullet and try to develop the habit of watching them regularly in foreign languages even though I lack this habit in my daily language - in the internet age, it feels too constraining to just read, without developing listening comprehension as well.
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Re: The limits of comprehensible input?

Postby Iversen » Mon Dec 17, 2018 12:38 pm

It does feel constraining only to be able to read things, but my stance has now become that it is easier to learn to understand and produce written texts so that's where I start with new languages.

When I then listen to TV programmes or sources on the internet - and soaps are definitely out in my case! - I'll in the beginning only understand a few words here and there, then some but not all entences, and with a bit of luck then more or less everything. And the last part of this process may go fast, as when I several back sat down to watch something called museum TV on a Dutch internet site - and then suddenly I could understand more or less the whole language fluently (a socalled epiphany moment). This is only possible when you already know a lot, and in my case it also presupposes that I already can read, think and write in the language.

BTW: on my TV right now there is a Croatian channel, which shows a US American program with the following three themes: how to survive a sugar binge, how to cook cheap and good meals in 16 minutes and is there a life after death (!) I can more or less understand the subtitles, but if I turn on the sound I would not yet be on the epiphany level - probably because I have spent too much time on music during the years where I have studied Slavic languages and therefore I haven't listened for nearly long enough.

Another afterthought: the majority of those who have reported success with strictly listening first have been through some kind on immersion or course where they have dealt with extremely simple utterances first and then proceeded to slightly more complicated utterances. Those who haven't been fanatically orally addicted have probably also read some textbooks and done some other things. I would however be curious to hear if anybody have learnt to speak a language ONLY from native sources, including TV fiction. I have one language on my list where it started out like that, namely Low German (Plattdüütsch), but here I already could understand High German fairly well when I watched those Talk op Platt programs on NDR. And because I never really have had an opportunity to get to speak it I would probably not be able to have a conversation in Low German at the turn of a hat - it would take at least an hour or so with a patient native speaker (and maybe some brush-up on the written version) before I could speak reasonably fluently.

You may then say: get a Skype mentor or something, but I don't like to be mentored - and especially not through gadgets. And for me paying a professional teacher would be like paying a domina to whip me ... I'm not into that kind of stuff.

I had a similar case with Scots, where it also was difficult to find anyone to speak to who spoke real hardcore Scots and not just one that had a Scottish accent. I have heard some rather genuine Scots during my stays, but not in situations where I could get to speak it myself - until at the gathering in Bratislava earlier this year, where I finally got my first conversation in Scots, hurray. However the point here is that I had prepared myself thoroughly by writing in Scots, reading whatever I could find (and that's not much) and by listening to people who at least had the accent (like Billy Connaly). And when I write I'll of course be using the things I already know plus an online dictionary PLUS my knowledge of English to fill out the holes - but only the last of these things is around me if I actually should meet a friendly (and patient!) Scots soul another time.
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