Acquisition or learning, comprehensible input or correction?

Um…that’s [color=#FF0040]acquisition[/color]. The rest is only learning. Acquisition sticks. Learning doesn’t. Acquisition trumps learning. Always.

To use learned language, the student must:

  1. Know the rule;
  2. Have time to apply the rule in speech or writing;
  3. Pay attention to the places where the rule must be applied.
    Great for tests, where these conditions can be met. Not very good for real life, where they generally are not.

To use acquired language, the student must:

  1. Speak or write.

The trick in a classroom situation is how to provide the maximum acquisition. In situations such as adult learners, it’s ideal, because there are no tests looming to distract from acquisition and push the emphasis onto learning.

The students need tons of input containing correct forms of the structures you want them to acquire. You can’t do this all at once. Select the one or two forms that bother you the most as a native speaker of English, and focus on them. Provide lots of input in which these structures are used. Occasionally “pop up” the structure (“Bob, what does the -s on the end of that word mean?”) to draw attention to the features you’re working – but then let it go and continue with more comprehensible input.

Do not waste time correcting the student’s output. It only makes people hesitant to speak. It won’t hasten acquisition. It might help learning – but learning has already been shown to have failed these students, or all that learning they’ve done in English previously would have resulted in correct output of the grammatical forms.

ironlady: Whenever my sister or I used to make mistakes, my parents would immediately correct us. Are you saying that wasn’t actually helpful and that it was simply exposure to correct English (by my parents, for example) that allowed us to acquire correct English?

GuyInTaiwan, I would go beyond that. It is questionable how much influence your parents actually have on the development of your language skills. The only way that your language skills would be heavily influenced by your parents is if someone was living in a country other than their native language and almost only spoke their language with their parents. Furthermore many people acquire accents that differ from their peers due to peer exposure.

If your parents English was an indicator of how someone spoke English then people will non-native English speaking parents in the US, Australia, Canada, and England would not acquire native like English.

Think about the issue of “ain’t”. (Housecat can attest to this, I think, coming from the South.) :smiley:

Most of the kids on the playground will use “ain’t”. “It ain’t his turn!” Then they all troop indoors and sit through the same lesson about how “ain’t” isn’t proper English and one must say “isn’t” instead. They will complete the same worksheets together, and they will be corrected by their well-meaning teacher over and over for using “ain’t”. When they have the time and mastery of the rule, they will consciously replace “ain’t” with “isn’t” in their speech, usually in the classroom or formal situations, if they’re not so nervous that their nerves override the needed attention to self-edit.

Otherwise, two minutes after the bell rings, the chant goes up once more on teh playground: “That ain’t fair!”

Ten thousand hours of input will always trump a couple dozen hours of teaching for spontaneous output. Unless the output isn’t spontaneous – which means it will not be fluent or flowing, but halting and rule-governed, because it is tapping the learned language rather than the acquired language.

Another good example is if one has a chance to talk with some children who attend the Taipei American School. They have trained American teachers who presumably use correct English. Then when you speak to them you pick up on certain errors that they still make due to speaking “Taipei American School English”. By that I mean speaking English with predominantly other Taiwanese who speak Mandarin at home. Sometimes you will hear incorrect verb conjugation, incorrect tense usage, and using the plural form incorrectly.

It seems that these children have their own form of English which differs from American English as well as Taiwanese English.

Think about the issue of “ain’t”. (Housecat can attest to this, I think, coming from the South.) :smiley:

Most of the kids on the playground will use “ain’t”. “It ain’t his turn!” Then they all troop indoors and sit through the same lesson about how “ain’t” isn’t proper English and one must say “isn’t” instead. They will complete the same worksheets together, and they will be corrected by their well-meaning teacher over and over for using “ain’t”. When they have the time and mastery of the rule, they will consciously replace “ain’t” with “isn’t” in their speech, usually in the classroom or formal situations, if they’re not so nervous that their nerves override the needed attention to self-edit.

Otherwise, two minutes after the bell rings, the chant goes up once more on teh playground: “That ain’t fair!”

Ten thousand hours of input will always trump a couple dozen hours of teaching for spontaneous output. Unless the output isn’t spontaneous – which means it will not be fluent or flowing, but halting and rule-governed, because it is tapping the learned language rather than the acquired language.[/quote]

As we say in the south, “You ain’t jist whistling Dixie!”

I’d also add that I do correct my son if he makes a mistake, but I don’t expect this to stop him from speaking to me! I don’t really expect it to stop him from making the mistake altogether. But it makes him aware that I am aware of his speech—and he lives with an English teacher. That has its consequences. He may still make his mistakes away from me—as the kids on the playground in Ironlady’s example, but when he speaks to me, and when he writes, I’ll expect more correct usage.

A L2 student, however, can be stymied by this because they aren’t just making a mistake—they are using language that is not natural or native to them and don’t know the correct usage. If they are interrupted for correction, but haven’t learned the correct usage, then they CAN’T continue to speak because they don’t have any other way to express themselves without the incorrect usage they were employing before they were corrected.

And it doesn’t matter than you just told them the correct usage. They can stumble along with that once or twice before they’ve forgotten it again. Now they’re stuck. They know that you just said that they shouldn’t say what they said last time, but haven’t learned the correct thing to say. Since they can’t say anything now, they can’t acquire anything at all. Not the correction you gave them, and not the language around the mistake.

A child corrected by his parents, or his L1 teacher, doesn’t have this issue.

This site just auto corrected my “jist,” as in, “You ain’t JIST whistling Dixie,” which is WHAT we say in the SOUTH!

Ironically, it also removed my italics from other words. Very, very odd.

ARGH! AGAIN! The word is J I S T Damn it!

When I taught English in Australia years ago, we had a course dedicated to how native speakers actually speak English. It was the grammar of spoken English as apposed to the written form which tends to be taught and stressed here. It is interesting to see how many ellipses native speakers make when talking, many of them are colloquial, but others like ‘gonna’ are fairly universal, plus we seem to have the capacity to understand a lot of missing stuff.

I mention this because it was a great way to make the learner language aware. We would have them listen to a lot of English in terms of how it is truly spoken, write it out with all its colloquialisms and ellipses in place and see what they made of it. It’s quite funny, too.

Interesting. So you’re saying that in order to have your children speak correctly, they need to have peers who speak English correctly? What about the fact that by the time they attend school, they’ve already been speaking the language (presumably reasonably correctly) for a few years? Also, my mother and one of her siblings both speak differently to their other two siblings, despite having the same social environment growing up.

What about Received Pronunciation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

I don’t think that what I, or Ironlady, really means, Guy. Anyway, we’re getting off topic, but you’re talking about L1 learners when you’re talking about your own kids.

Again off topic, but my best friend’s father had scarlet fever as a child and has a very heavy speach impedement as a result. Anyone who hasn’t spent years talking to/listening to him, usually has no idea what he’s saying. His daughters did not grow up sounding like him, but that’s not all.

When I was first getting to know him, I’d get confused by things he said sometimes, but everyone thought that it was simply the speach problem. That wasn’t it. He also has his own grammar going on.

For instance, this man uses a single pronoun, on he mad up–“tho”-- to mean him/her/he/she/it/they/them. Perhaps this came from difficulty in pronounciation and the people around him being more concerned with understanding him than with correcting him, but he’s done that as long as I’ve known him. When my friend was in college, she once said to me that she’d observed that and wondered if I had. I’d observed it years before!

But my friend doesn’t do that. He has other differences in his “English” than anyone else I’ve known, but they’re unique to him. He didn’t learn them from anyone. Why? Why didn’t he pass them on? I don’t know. But I’d still correct my son and not allow him to pick them up.

Well they will spend 12 years in school with their peers.

Furthermore you are opening an entire can of worms. What does it mean to speak correctly? I am not saying that we should go there but that is a debate that could go on forever.

Good luck with that. I am not sure how you are going to stop him from speaking English the way he desires. Or he will simply speak to you the way that you want him to and ignore the language that you prefer he uses when he talks to everyone else.

[quote=“steelersman”]

Well, some Asian students in the US speak very little English. Of course there are Asians who mix and mingle and their English is usually better. Graduating from a Canadian or American university does not mean that the person in question actually spoke English during those four years. They may have passively sat in class, taken the test, and graduated.[/quote]

My friend is engaged to a Taiwanese woman and living in New Zealand. When he visited Taiwan last week, he told me that his fiance was taking classes in New Zealand. She was shocked when the professor told her to study less and go out more. :ponder:

That’s oK, I get the gist.

That’s oK, I get the gist.[/quote]

Har har.

I’m finding the various strands of discussion here interesting. I have to say, though, I’m not convinced by the idea that direct instruction from the teacher in regard to errors is a waste of time. What if its carefully done? I’m reminded of the NLP model (it may come from elsewhere?) of how we move from incompetence to competence. I’m sure most know it, but just to reiterate for those who may not, it runs as follows - we start with unconscious incompetence, then move to conscious incompetence, and then on to conscious competence, to finally, arrive at unconscious competence. At which point one has acquired the skill and can do it without conscious effort. From what I’m hearing here of comprehensible input it seems that there is no room for conscious reflection on the skills being acquired. I think this has more than a tinge of idealism about it. We’re conscious reflecting beings. Reflecting on how we’re doing is a big part of how we improve.

This suggests that in any language/skill learning situation a degree of consciousness of the learning target and what is a hit and what is a miss is helpful. The key then is to make your learners aware of their incompetence in a way that allows them a degree of self correction without impeding their language production unduly. That is in a way that encourages self correction and competence. This is not to say that this is a complete strategy, but I think it can/should be included alongside lots of comprehensible input.

Let me know if I’m getting ‘comprehensible input’ all wrong.

[quote=“Dial”]I’m finding the various strands of discussion here interesting. I have to say, though, I’m not convinced by the idea that direct instruction from the teacher in regard to errors is a waste of time. What if its carefully done? I’m reminded of the NLP model (it may come from elsewhere?) of how we move from incompetence to competence. I’m sure most know it, but just to reiterate for those who may not, it runs as follows - we start with unconscious incompetence, then move to conscious incompetence, and then on to conscious competence, to finally, arrive at unconscious competence. At which point one has acquired the skill and can do it without conscious effort. From what I’m hearing here of comprehensible input it seems that there is no room for conscious reflection on the skills being acquired. I think this has more than a tinge of idealism about it. We’re conscious reflecting beings. Reflecting on how we’re doing is a big part of how we improve.

This suggests that in any language/skill learning situation a degree of consciousness of the learning target and what is a hit and what is a miss is helpful. The key then is to make your learners aware of their incompetence in a way that allows them a degree of self correction without impeding their language production unduly. That is in a way that encourages self correction and competence. This is not to say that this is a complete strategy, but I think it can/should be included alongside lots of comprehensible input.

Let me know if I’m getting ‘comprehensible input’ all wrong.[/quote]

I tend to agree with that. That’s why I suggested having students look at the grammar of how language is really spoken so that you can both reflect on that from a point of equal standing and then segway into their errors. Although we have the capacity to acquire language it doesn’t mean we will acquire a language free of grammatical errors. I think if anyone is espousing that then they are plain wrong. Even though children acquire language as infants they do so with many grammatical errors as any parent can attest to but the self correct quickly that is an innate capacity. We lose it, not all of it but a great deal of it.

Just to be a bit cynical for a moment about error correction: most of us here are hired as teachers. Yes, our philosophical/ pedagogical goal is to improve our students’ English, but our students/ employers want us to be teachers. In Taiwan, and most everywhere actually, that means they expect us to correct mistakes.

Whether or not error correction particularly helps students, I do find it useful as a technique because it helps make students BELIEVE that something is actually going on. With private students, this helps lead to continued employment; in a classroom, it helps avoid the “English is a joke and my foreign teacher is a clown!” attitude that develops all too easily. I certainly don’t make error correction a major focus, but I throw it in there, because that’s what the student - the customer - expects.

I guess I view error correction as something like dressing professionally. It’s not a crucial part of teaching, but it makes people think you’re a teacher.

(I also find error correction useful with complacent writing students that think they simply need to “fine-tune” their English and don’t realize their grammar is a disaster - and I see more than a few of these in my university classes. But that’s not what the OP is talking about.)

The current best practices in Comprehensible Input involve about a 90-10 or sometimes 95-5 mixture of input to direrct instruction, but the direct grammar instruction is always broken up into microscopic chunks (not longer than about 5 seconds at a time) within the input.

Since we are teaching adults, and we also need to account for the students who are analytically-minded (it seems to be about 4% of language learners who would learn the language and becomg reasonably fluent even if they only had a textbook from 1956 and no help), CI teachers use direct instruction as well. We DO want to teach students to edit – it is a very useful skill, particularly for the more formal registers and formal writing, where most people end up producing correct language through the application of rules.

But for the basics – those crucial first, say, 2000 or 3000 words ANd all the structure of the language – the main goal is to achieve acquisition, so that those are truly in the brain and can be used and comprehended without effort or thought.

We are not for input over all else just for the sake of championing input. If someone showed me another combination or element that has been demonstrated to work better to get people to acquire language, I would adopt it. But having studied and used most of the methods out there (in the course of having done a doctorate in foreign language education) at this point I am an avowed 95-5 input person.

Kids do not acquire language with grammatical errors – the process of the acquisition of grammar brings out what sound like errors since most of them are actually over-applications of a rule that has been internalized. It takes time for kids to learn the exceptions in a language. It is not an error for a child to say “goed” instead of “went” (assuming the child is of the appropriate age) – it is simply normal language development. The natural process of acquisition.

That is why, for example, in teaching Spanish, which has a list of about 10 tough irregular preterite verbs that are also pretty common words, we place so much emphasis on making sure the students hear those forms over and over, so they sound “right”. And we do it little by little, and do not expect them to memorize a list and bingo be able to use and comprehend all those forms immediately. Then the irregular forms gradually take their place as correct in the student’s internak model of the grammar of the language.