Do you learn better with audio or written material?

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NoManches
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby NoManches » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:02 am

reineke wrote:
NoManches wrote:I think this has been mentioned briefly before...


How to learn vocabulary?
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =17&t=6771

Listening vs Reading
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=7833

Reading or listening? Which is more efficient?
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=1220

Great Literature = Better Listening Skills
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... f=14&t=841

Memorization and You
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 56&p=65113

Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=5698



Thank you for sharing. I normally do a search beforehand but this time I'm glad that I didn't because this thread is generating some great comments.

Henkkles wrote:I have lots of trouble with topics like this one, as it takes me a long time to understand what the question really is.


Ani wrote:Learn *what* better?


I definitely could have done a better job with how I phrased my question. I suppose I was referring to learning vocabulary, but I think this topic could be applied to language learning in general.

I know a few people who have learned foreign languages almost exclusively from speaking and listening. Some of these people are day laborers who are so tired after a long day of work that the last thing they will do is open a book in English to read. As a matter of fact, some of them are barely literate but speak English as a second language very well. Yet, with a lack of written English they have somehow learned the language almost entirely from listening and speaking. I'm sure I could do the same thing but without seeings words written down I think it would take me an incredibly long time to start picking up on new words and the language in general.

*Edit*

I almost forgot to add that I have been with people who can hear a word one time in a foreign language and learn it right away or very quickly, while I've had to hear the word multiple times and only after trying to reproduce it (and failing) was I able to reproduce the word after being corrected or reminded of it. I think people who have a bigger grasp of their L2 have an easier time learning new words through both audio and written materials.
Last edited by NoManches on Sun Jun 03, 2018 2:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby reineke » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:47 am

Is Listening to an Audio book "Cheating?"

"I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it. I’ll describe why in a bit, but for now I’ll just change it to “does your mind do more or less the same thing when you listening to an audio book and when you read print?”

The short answer is “mostly.”

An influential model of reading is the simple view (Gough & Tumner, 1986), which claims that two fundamental processes contribute to reading: decoding and language processing. “Decoding” obviously refers to figuring out words from print. “Language processing” refers to the same mental processes you use for oral language. Reading, as an evolutionary late-comer, must piggy-back on mental processes that already existed, and spoken communication does much of the lending.

So according to the simple model, listening to an audio book is exactly like reading print, except that the latter requires decoding and the former doesn’t.

Is the simple view right?

Some predictions you’d derive from the simple view are supported. For example, You’d expect that a lot of the difference in reading proficiency in the early grades would be due to differences in decoding. In later grades, most children are pretty fluent decoders so differences in decoding would be more due to processes that support comprehension. That prediction seems to be true (e.g., Tilstra et al, 2009).

Especially relevant to the question of audiobooks, you’d also predict that for typical adults (who decode fluently) listening comprehension and reading comprehension would be mostly the same thing. And experiments show very high correlations of scores on listening and reading comprehension tests in adults (Bell & Perfetti, 1994; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990).

The simple view is a useful way to think about the mental processes involved in reading, especially for texts that are more similar to spoken language, and that we read for purposes similar to those of listening. The simple view is less applicable when we put reading to other purposes, e.g., when students study a text for a quiz, or when we scan texts looking for a fact as part of a research project.

The simple view is also likely incomplete for certain types of texts. The written word is not always similar to speech. In such cases prosody might be an aid to comprehension. Prosody refers to changes in pacing, pitch, and rhythm in speech. “I really enjoy your blog” can either be a sincere compliment or a sarcastic put-down—both look identical on the page, and prosody would communicate the difference in spoken language.
We do hear voices in our heads as we read...

For audio books, the reader doesn't need to supply the prosody--whoever is reading the book aloud does so.

For difficult-to-understand texts, prosody can be a real aid to understanding...

So listening to an audio book may have more information that will make comprehension a little easier. Prosody might clarify the meaning of ambiguous words or help you to assign syntactic roles to words.

But most of the time it doesn’t, because most of what you listen to is not that complicated. For most books, for most purposes, listening and reading are more or less the same thing.

So listening to an audiobook is not “cheating,” but let me tell you why I objected to phrasing the question that way. “Cheating” implies an unfair advantage, as though you are receiving a benefit while skirting some work. Why talk about reading as though it were work?

Listening to an audio book might be considered cheating if the act of decoding were the point; audio books allow you to seem to have decoded without doing so. But if appreciating the language and the story is the point, it’s not. ​Comparing audio books to cheating is like meeting a friend at Disneyland and saying “you took a bus here? I drove myself, you big cheater.” The point is getting to and enjoying the destination. The point is not how you traveled."

http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel- ... k-cheating
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby Henkkles » Sun Jun 03, 2018 10:25 am

NoManches wrote:I know a few people who have learned foreign languages almost exclusively from speaking and listening. Some of these people are day laborers who are so tired after a long day of work that the last thing they will do is open a book in English to read. As a matter of fact, some of them are barely literate but speak English as a second language very well. Yet, with a lack of written English they have somehow learned the language almost entirely from listening and speaking. I'm sure I could do the same thing but without seeings words written down I think it would take me an incredibly long time to start picking up on new words and the language in general.

*Edit*

I almost forgot to add that I have been with people who can hear a word one time in a foreign language and learn it right away or very quickly, while I've had to hear the word multiple times and only after trying to reproduce it (and failing) was I able to reproduce the word after being corrected or reminded of it. I think people who have a bigger grasp of their L2 have an easier time learning new words through both audio and written materials.


Learning new words from hearing them only once is called "fast-mapping" and it seems to be a function of the degree to which you are proficient with the phonology of the language. Syntactic knowledge is also a factor, as proficient users can deduce a lot about a word based on the syntactic frame it occurs in. I don't think this is a question of what you are like as a person (as in some people being more attuned to learning one way or another) but that phenomena like fast-mapping become available once you become sufficiently familiar with the language.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:50 pm

As Henkkles says, a lot of this depends on your level of ability.

In order to learn to say a word, you need to know how to say it. At an early level, I generally learn vocabulary best from a written source, because my ear isn't good enough to hear all the phonemes, but in many languages the written form gives a mostly unambiguous idea of how it's pronounced. But if the orthography isn't unambiguous, then I'm going to need more of a description of how to pronounce it, whether in the IPA or something else. A well-trained teacher could probably deliver the full description of how to pronounce it orally, meaning I could learn the same thing just as well from listening, but as you're not going to have your teacher to hand 24/7, it's less practical.

However, if you were to tell me a new word (orally) in Spanish, Italian or French, I'd have a good chance of being able to repeat it correctly and spell it right to boot, without ever once having seen it written.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby sfuqua » Tue Jun 05, 2018 5:29 pm

Research seems to support the idea that it is better to use written material to learn vocabulary. Several studies support this idea.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2010.00593.x
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/April2017/articles/hatami.pdf

The advantage of learning vocabulary through reading drops off as learners become more proficient.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby reineke » Tue Jun 05, 2018 7:59 pm

The inescapable case for extensive reading

"Verb collocations of Idea. e.g. abandon an idea
abandon, absorb, accept, adjust to, advocate, amplify, advance, back, be against, be committed/dedicated/drawn to, be obsessed with, be struck by, borrow, cherish, clarify, cling to, come out/up with, confirm, conjure up, consider, contemplate, convey, debate, debunk, defend, demonstrate, develop, deny, dismiss, dispel, disprove, distort, drop …

…the occurrence of general English words above about the 2-3000 headword level, becomes rather random, unstable and unpredictable for selection. The data clearly show that learners wishing to master more than 3000 words must resort to upgraded texts as most graded reader series top out at around this level. However, doing this further complicates the task because as frequency lowers, each new word appears less frequently which in turn requires more volume of text to be written to meet unknown or partially known words (one’s “partially-known vocabulary”). Unless the volume of reading is increased, it is likely that any partial knowledge of a given word will be lost from memory especially as each individual occurrence of words above this level appears so randomly and unpredictably in ungraded text. These data together suggest that it is unlikely much learning will occur from only reading above the 3000 word level unless several thousands of words are read per day.

To this point we have examined the vocabulary task at hand. If we now turn to the grammar, we can see a similarly massive task ahead of our learners.

The…the present perfect tense appears with differing subjects and objects, as both yes/no and wh- question forms, in the negative as well as declarative. It can be active or passive, continuous or simple, with have or has and that does not count the myriad regular and irregular past participle forms and the short answer forms. There are about 75 different possible variations of the form of the present perfect tense – and that does not count the different uses such as present perfect for experiences (I’ve been to Paris), present perfect for recent news (He’s got a new car); or present perfect for recently completed events (He’s just finished dinner)! Nor does it count how the present perfect is different from say the past simple or past perfect tenses.

To be able to master the form, function and pragmatic information underlying the forms, let alone the different uses and nuances of the present perfect tense as well as learning how it differs from other tenses, must surely take thousands and thousands of meetings.
We have a fairly good idea about the uptake rates for words, but what about grammatical features? It is sad to say that after an exhaustive search for the uptake rates of grammatical features it appears that in the whole history of language research there is no data at all. None. This is amazing given that the vast majority of language courses taught today have a grammatical focus at least in part.
One might easily conclude from the above that we should not ask learners to learn vocabulary incidentally from reading, but rather adopt a systematic and intensive approach to direct vocabulary learning such as with word cards. One might even go further to conclude that by doing so, learners would not need to “waste” time reading, because they can learn faster from intentional learning and free up valuable class / learning time. However, this would be a grave mistake and a fundamentally flawed conclusion because language learning is far more complex than the extremely simplistic picture given above.

As has been mentioned, the above mentioned studies and the data in Table 1, define a “word” as a single meaning based on orthographic forms that a computer can understand and thus polysemous meanings, collocations and so forth were omitted which vastly underestimates the actual task at hand. To really know a word well, learners need to know not only meanings and spellings, but the nuances of its meanings, its register, whether it is more commonly used for speaking or writing, which discourse categories it is usually found in, as well as its collocations and colligations, among many other things. The above studies see words as single stand-alone objects rather than words that co-exist and are co-learnt (and forgotten) with other words. They vastly underestimate what might be learnt because they only look at a partial, though very important, picture of word learning – the learning of single meanings...
Where are the books that systematically teach this “deeper” vocabulary knowledge and recycle it dozens or hundreds of times beyond the form-meaning relationship (collocation etc.) for even the 1000 most frequent words? A few books exist but do not even come close to more than random selection of a choice few collocations, whereas as we have seen, learners need vastly more. In short, these materials do not exist. Even if they did, it would take a monumental amount of motivation to plough through such books intentionally and I doubt few, if any, learners have this stamina."

http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_wh ... _vital.htm

Research on vocabulary acquisition through listening is limited.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby Iversen » Tue Jun 05, 2018 8:08 pm

I definitely remember writing better than speech, and therefore my first success criterion is not that I can buy chips from native speaker, but rather more something like being able to read an average article in the relevant version of Wikipedia. And after that: that I can write and think fluently in the language, and only THEN it becomes relevant that I can buy those chips in Greek or Russian or whatever.

reineke wrote:Research on vocabulary acquisition through listening is limited.


Limited, but not zero. I commented on the generally miserable results in my speech at the polyglot conference in Novi Sad, and there I also referred to the fact that many of you guys claim to be able to learn both from random listening and random reading. So what have you got that the test persons of the language psychologists ain't got? Well, maybe a general interest in languages .. or in other words, a predisposition that installs a permanently active neuronal suction device that serves to identify and retain new words. If you don't care a bit about languages then the new words just pass through your mind without leaving other trace than maybe a slight irritation about having to do such a silly test.
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Re: Do you learn better with audio or written material?

Postby reineke » Tue Jun 05, 2018 9:20 pm

Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning.
Elke Peters (a1) and Stuart Webb

Published online: 30 January 2018

"Research has begun to demonstrate that L2 words can be learned incidentally through watching audio-visual materials. Although there are a large number of studies that have investigated incidental vocabulary learning through reading a single text, there are no studies that have explored incidental vocabulary learning through viewing a single full-length TV program. The present study fills this gap. Additionally, three word-related variables (frequency of occurrence, cognateness, word relevance) and one learner-related variable (prior vocabulary knowledge) that might contribute to incidental vocabulary learning were examined. Two experiments were conducted with Dutch-speaking EFL learners to measure the effects of viewing TV on form recognition and meaning recall (Experiment 1) and meaning recognition (Experiment 2). The findings showed that viewing TV resulted in incidental vocabulary learning at the level of meaning recall and meaning recognition. The research also revealed that learning was affected by frequency of occurrence, prior vocabulary knowledge, and cognateness...

The bulk of research into incidental vocabulary acquisition has focused on exposure to L2 reading texts with the majority of studies showing that vocabulary can be learned incidentally through reading a short text or text excerpt...

One of the greatest benefits of TV is that it provides learners with large amounts of authentic, spoken L2 input Webb, 2015). Compared to reading (Cobb, 2007), TV programs also have the advantage that low-frequency words occur repeatedly in a relatively small amount of viewing time...Moreover, Rodgers and Webb (2011) found that repeated encounters with low-frequency words were even higher in the case of related TV programs, such as episodes from the same TV program.

Most studies investigating TV viewing have used short video clips that were a maximum of 15 minutes long. The participants in these studies were also very often children. An exception is Rodgers’ (2013) study that explored incidental vocabulary learning through viewing 10 full-length episodes of one TV program. He found that adult L2 learners learned new words and that the learning gains were comparable to those found in reading studies. However, whether L2 vocabulary is learned incidentally through viewing a single TV program in the same way that L2 words are learned through reading a single text (e.g., Horst, Cobb, & Meara, 1998; Pellicer-Sánchez & Schmitt, 2010; Saragi, Nation, & Meister, 1978; Waring & Takaki, 2003) remains to be examined. Taken together, there appears to be a clear need for research investigating the effects of TV viewing if we are to better understand the role audiovisual input might play in L2 lexical development..."

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000407

"We have tons of data from ER but almost nothing for EL. This seems totally weird and unbalanced to me as almost every teacher encourages 'conversation' (and thereby listening) as a way to improve one's English. Everything we know about ER's benefits (for vocab learning, for overall motivation, for language consolidation, to build fluency etc etc etc) need to be confirmed (or rejected) for EL. All the canonical work done in ER needs to be mirrored with EL. E.g.

What's the uptake of vocabulary from EL?
What known/unknown word ratio facilitates this?
How much listening is needed?
How does one's EL ability develop?
What prevents/ encourages comprehension in fluent listening?
How do students segment the sound stream in EL?"

Rob Waring
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