How do you make your self-study more active?

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klvik
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How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby klvik » Sat Jan 20, 2018 5:27 pm

A piece of study advice commonly given to university students is to try to make their study more active. For instance, if you are trying to learn a biochemical pathway, redrawing a diagram may be more effective than simply re-reading it in the textbook. Instead of re-reading your notes, you can rewrite them in a different way. Of course, talking to someone in the language that you're learning is an active process, as is writing, but I find that right now the majority of my language learning time is spent reading and listening in my target language, both inherently passive activities. This has lead me to think about ways to make my learning routine more active. Of course, grammar workbook exercises, GLOSS activities* (https://gloss.dliflc.edu/) or transcription (see recent discussion in rdearman's log) are all very active learning activities. But, I am more interested in those little things that people do (consciously or unconsciously) to make reading and listening more active. For instance, I strongly suspect that the people who progress most rapidly through extensive listening are those who more actively engaged in the process and I want to learn their secrets.

So-- what type of strategies do you use to make your self-study time (especially listening) more active?


*GLOSS may be unavailable due to US government shutdown.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby mcthulhu » Sun Jan 21, 2018 4:10 am

I'll respond just for reading. It's probably mostly various ways of testing recall. When I come across an unfamiliar word, I try to fix its spelling in my mind (guessing at its dictionary form if necessary), so that when I do look it up, I can do it from memory instead of just copying letters from the page. I try to remember the last few unfamiliar words, and then look them up later as a group when I've accumulated enough of them, instead of going immediately to the dictionary. Obviously I make an effort to guess meaning from context first, instead of looking up words mindlessly. Whether I have to correct my guess or I have the pleasure of being right, coming up with a hypothesis first seems to help me remember better.

Sometimes I'll look away from a book and try to remember the last sentence or two that I read, and then look back and see how close I came. (Short-term recall is more challenging than it sounds, at least at my age.) Sometimes instead of trying to remember the exact words used, I'll summarize or paraphrase the latest section, using what I think are the key words, or possibly simpler equivalents for them. This is an exercise I should do more often, I think. I only do this mentally, not in writing.

Often at the bottom of a page that ends in the middle of a sentence, I stop and try to guess what words will appear at the top of the next page, based on the sequence of words so far; sometimes I even win this little game and award myself points. Predicting text further out is much more difficult, but I occasionally speculate about what might happen in the next page or two, and how the author might phrase it, and then I wait to see whether I'm right.

I enjoy spotting synonyms or alternative ways of saying something. I might stop and try to figure out why the author chose to say it one way in one place and a different way in another place, and whether it's just for stylistic variety or whether there's a different shade of meaning or a different register involved.

I was taught to read without moving my lips, of course, but sometimes I sound out a passage to myself mentally -- and if I find that I am unsure about how some words should sound, I might stop and check on their pronunciation. (This applies to some languages more than others; omitted short vowels in words you haven't seen before, for instance, can be a challenge.) Very rarely, I might actually read aloud to myself for a bit, but that tends to annoy people around me.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby Cavesa » Sun Jan 21, 2018 2:53 pm

I don't think I know what you are asking about. Self-study is very active, it is not just rereading.

What do you want as "being actively engaged" during extensive listening? Of course you are actively engaged, you are focusing on the content. Extensive listening is not having something as a background. It is not being lazy.

Again "I stop and try to remember what I've just read", that is standard, not something more. Self-study, or any studying, is a very active process. I think you are basing this question on prejudice (which is not uncommon), that people just reread textbooks stupidly.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby Elenia » Sun Jan 21, 2018 7:59 pm

Cavesa wrote:Again "I stop and try to remember what I've just read", that is standard, not something more.


Actually, I never do that, and it has never occurred to me to try. The most I do when reading is write down interesting words and sentences when I feel like it (although I'm not very consistent with this). I do have a journal with short pieces of writing or poetry that I have really liked, at current just in Swedish and English, and I tend to work fairly intensively with those, but only once, and when rereading I can't really remember all the new vocabulary. Maybe if I actually think about the words and the sentences in more depth, I'll have more success.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:59 pm

Counterintuitive to my own goofy logic, what I find myself doing is adjusting the difficulty level and the novelty of my interactions to make my own participation more active. The active participation takes care of itself when the challenge level is right and/or when I have plenty of novelty. Novelty is very ephemeral while challenge is much more persistent so I lean on challenge as the key player.

In the case of reading, I choose more challenging material to ensure that I will participate with alacrity since the more difficult material prompts lookups, extra typing, extra thinking and more noticing of grammatical structures, collocations and other language elements that keep me engaged. I freely admit to confusing the notions of more active and more intensive stopping just shy of landing myself in a bog. When I did the opposite by reducing the challenge and reading contemporary young adult novels, listening and reading all at once, my subjective results were not as good. 2000 pages washed over me like a tide, but without changing as much as I expected (okay, maybe I got what I bargained for). In the one case, I was simply absorbed in the young adult novel and didn't actively do much at all (autopilot and I enjoyed the story, lulling me into a false sense of accomplishment), but with a shorter, objectively harder book (900 pages by a bloke who wasn't writing for teenagers), my experience was much more well-rounded from a language learning perspective and far more active. To be sure, both experiences offered some improvement, but active is the question of the hour! I noticed left, right and center and felt like a kid in a candy store with my harder text. Motivation was higher and I even found myself quoting from the text often. For me, if I am doing that, things are going well and I am actively engaged.

With listening, it is [currently] the opposite and that is what felt vaguely counterintuitive. My listening skills are weaker, so what I needed to do in order to be more active is simplify my choices and put on crutches to make sure I could follow the meaning of what I was hearing. It is a delicate matter and a delicate balancing act. I jumped on listening to audiobooks, because it let me play on my strengths (vocabulary being an English native learning Spanish), but removed all of the components that would have otherwise turned my brain to mush (background static, tons of people shouting, regional slang, shallow topics, too much colloquial dialogue that I didn't care about). I want my listening to offer a rich vocabulary and for the speakers to have invested time and effort into what they are saying, given that my interest in listening is mostly related to knowledge acquisition. I split my listening time to where I can treat a portion of it like pure gold. I am not sure I always gave my listening minutes their due since I knew there would be so many of them. I don't always let my old habits of zoning completely out and claiming auditory incompetence into those golden moments. In short, I put it on a pedestal that I can only imagine as a language learner and poof....more active.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby garyb » Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:11 am

I've read in a couple of books about learning that "testing" is very helpful to the learning process, and I think that's a good argument for doing a some work beyond just listening and reading (although listening and reading do give an element of testing in themselves, like encountering a word or expression and trying to remember what it means). There are plenty options: apps like Anki/Memrise/Closemaster/Duolingo (different people prefer different ones), traditional textbook-style grammar and comprehension exercises, and of course nothing puts your knowledge to the test more than writing and speaking.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby iguanamon » Mon Jan 22, 2018 12:26 pm

One of the things that helped me out a lot when I was learning Haitian Creole were university resources. These days, university professors put a lot online. The first real novel I read in Kreyòl was Woben Lakwa, a translation into Creole of Robinson Crusoe. Professor Hebblethwaite of the University of Florida had posted a study guide to the book with varied exercises and comprehension questions online that I worked through which helped me to consolidate all the vocabulary, language and structures I was learning.

Much of the time, such perfect solutions as I had for Kreyòl are hard to find. Still, you can indeed test yourself. Also, if you are reading a translated classic, you can find study guides online. For instance Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice has been talked about as an LR choice. It has been translated into a lot of major languages. While there may not be study guides available on it in TL, there is plenty of material available in English with quizzes and chapter analyses. While this will all be in English, nothing prevents a learner from answering questions in TL. Pride and Prejudice CliffsNotes Quiz

With my experience in Kreyòl in mind, I downloaded a study guide/workbook to Alícia al país de les meravelles (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) in Catalan used in Catalan schools and freely available from the Catalan government. Evertype press has the book avialable in a ton of translations with a lot of uncommon and minority languages represented (including Maori, Aromanian, Yiddish and many more). I've read the book in Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol translation. There's also The Little Prince available in every translation under the sun along with The Bible, The Koran, Plato and Harry Potter. All have analyses, chapter summaries and many have workbooks and study guides. In addition, there are opportunities to discuss some of these books in online forums in TL... and there's always Goodreads and wikipedia.

For listening, I have taken notes/transcribed audio and checked it against an accurate transcript. For an audio book, again with a popular classic, it's easy to find chapter analyses and comprehension exercises online. With popular series, dubbed especially, the same thing exists. In Spanish and Portuguese there are sites with summaries of telenovelas which can aid with testing comprehension. Popular films often have a lot written about them. In short, there is more to consuming native material than just consuming it. While some may consider listening and reading to be "passive", it can be as "active" as learners want it to be... if they make an effort.

Edited: spelling, link to a quiz
Last edited by iguanamon on Mon Jan 22, 2018 1:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby tarvos » Mon Jan 22, 2018 12:31 pm

If your self-study isn't active, then what are you doing, for heaven's sake????
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby mcthulhu » Mon Jan 22, 2018 10:36 pm

I think the OP's question has been interpreted in several different ways. This would not be the first time.
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Re: How do you make your self-study more active?

Postby klvik » Mon Jan 22, 2018 11:43 pm

mcthulhu wrote:I think the OP's question has been interpreted in several different ways. This would not be the first time.


I can understand the confusion. I used jargon in my original post and did not clearly define the usage. If anyone is unclear, the links below may help to clarify the use of "ative" in this context.

https://meded.ucsd.edu/index.cfm/ugme/o ... _actively/

https://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tu ... strategies
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