Uncle Roger wrote:garyb wrote:I agree that the idea that learning just takes care of itself after a certain level is a dangerous one. My experience is the opposite: once at "advanced B2", progress is slow and I really need to put in significant time and effort to keep moving rather than stay on a plateau. I indeed see the same in the majority of English learners living in the UK: after B2 or so their progress comes to a halt for years or decades, because that level is good enough to do what they need and they're no longer making a conscious effort to improve.
There were plenty of conditionals in my previous post
The assumption is that the "student" has to be the right one. You are right, it's not always a given. I worked for 3 years in a typical FIGS environment in the UK (French, Italian, German, Spanish). Yes, most people's English would stay the same the moment they could get by. Sure, their passive vocabulary would increase (and pretty much without specific effort), they could understand all that natives were saying to them. But yes, they would get stuck on the same mistakes.
For the more switched on individuals, though, there is a threshold in my experience. It'll work much better for the more motivated, attentive learners. People that are probably very good active speaker sin their own native language (I genuinely believe there are significantly various degrees at which people actively speak their own language).
I'd be tempted to say that, at that level of advancement, if you don't learn by doing it, you probably just can't quite learn it past B2/C1, even if you tried?
I think the misunderstanding is here: noone says you can learn without tons of exposure and without lots of "doing". Actually, Garyb and I have both been very active about promoting exactly this. What we are saying: it is very often helpful not to give up on the more boring and less natural tools, at least not too early. They can be very helpful. Especially as we are talking about Carmody here, who is now fighting the loooong battle against the intermediate level.
Noone has been talking about people unable to learn by doing, just about the fact that the progress is not automatic, not even in the ideal conditions. People who work consciously work on themselves simply progress much faster and better than people counting on the magic around.
I believe any person able to get through high school is also able to get to a C1 in a foreign language. A university educated person should be able to get to C2. At least as far as talent goes. But most of those stuck at a lower level are "doing" and should be "learning by doing" all the time. But many of them are held back exactly because they gave up on grammarbooks, srs, and similar stuff. I definitely don't think a university professor stuck around B2 is stuck because of lack of talent.
There are more paths. Noone has been proposing a single miracle method.
But I can tell you from my own experience that returning to the boring stuff at the higher levels can still be very useful at times. And actually failing to return to it, at such a point, can lead to stagnation or even regression. My posts on this forum are a clear example. I am supposedly "learning by doing" a lot, I am writing too much!
But I put my advanced grammarbooks in the bookcase eight years ago and they've been collecting dust ever since. And it shows. I have the potential to write better than this and not to make stupid mistakes (on my defense, the worst ones happen around 3am
). I am just not using it, because I refuse to return to that kind of activities, at least for now.
I am all for using as much natural native input as possible. I think all my logs and posts prove it. But I just don't consider it reasonable to dogmatically throw away tools that could be helpful to some learners.