Iversen wrote:In spite of such misgivings I do think that the success you will have with specific techniques to a large extent can be traced back to your general personality and your specific skills in certain key areas. The intermediary may be your attitude: if you hate a certain technique then you probably won't benefit from it - as in my case with roleplay. But the fundamental characteristic can still be something more fundamental like your attitude to enforced histronics and your degree of intro/extrovertness.
One of the things that bugs me in education is how educationalists completely fail to understand the consequences of their own research.
I believe it's starting to go out of fashion now, but the big idea for most of this century was "learning objectives" or "lesson goals" -- tell students what they're going to learn because research somewhere along the line pointed out that people who didn't see the point of what they were doing were less likely to learn. Of course, it's fairly obvious, but it's good research points it out, and I think that's a bigger issue than general "hate" for a technique -- it's a matter of not seeing the point.
Certain language activities can leave my head screaming out "I DON'T WANT TO SAY THAT" -- this can be when I'm asked to answer in sentences (
WHO TALKS LIKE THAT???), when I'm asked to say "I am a woman" (
I AM A MAN!!) or even worse "I am English" (not because I dislike English people, but there's a whole assertion of identity thing what with the tendency some people have to call the whole UK "England").
The reason "learning objectives" don't work is because it's a culture of telling people that calling themselves a woman or a nationality that they are not will help them to learn grammar, rather than simply developing activities that the brain doesn't actively resist engaging with.
Personally, I believe real language learning comes from saying something
and meaning it, rather than saying something mechanically for intellectual purposes. I don't think anyone disagrees with me there. Role-playing is supposed to be about meaning it, and the reason it fails for a lot of people is that they don't feel like they mean it.
With the do-nothing list and the gold list I stayed at that level, but with my own system I raised the percentage to roughly two thirds of the words - and that includes words that I hadn't even used in my lists. So for me the goldlists had no effect at all.
You've always talked about how you use your lists in an active way; as I say above, the goal of goldlists is to prevent passive memorisation. As that's not a problem you have, it's not a solution you need.
Let's take another example: Benny Lewis' "speak from day one" approach. […] But others who are more sociable and who can remember things they just hear once should definitely try the 'speak from day one' strategy - it may work for them.
Except that that isn't Benny's approach. Last I checked, he worked through a stack of learners resources before getting on a plane, then used all the input to reinforce that bank of half-learned half-remembered knowledge in his head.
It's like he takes intensive, incomplete swimming lessons the jumps into the middle of the ocean, and finds it all starts to click.
Then he tells people the key to learning to swim is to jump into the middle of the ocean without lessons. "But you took lessons." "Ah, but that's not the important part."
>sigh<