Students operate on the input-output construction. Teacher inputs knowledge, students then posess this knowledge and are able to utilise it. This from the assumption that the brain is a piece of hardware that software such as languages or teachers’ lessons run on. Therefore, when the software doesn’t run despite repeated reinstalls, the student assumes that there is something wrong with the software (or hardware). You can hear the computer metaphor for thinking and learning a lot.
[quote=“Ermintrude”]Students operate on the input-output construction. Teacher inputs knowledge, students then posess this knowledge and are able to utilise it. This from the assumption that the brain is a piece of hardware that software such as languages or teachers’ lessons run on. Therefore, when the software doesn’t run despite repeated reinstalls, the student assumes that there is something wrong with the software (or hardware). You can hear the computer metaphor for thinking and learning a lot.
It’s an unsophisticated analogy.[/quote]
Input-output is precisely how language is acquired. The problem with Taiwanese language schools is that there is far too little input and far too much output expected. But inputting knowledge about language won’t do the trick, and that is another facet of the Taiwanese buxiban experience that is lacking: the input is usually information about the language, not language + meaning.
I find myself half-agreeing and half-disagreeing with these assessments.
Yes, it’s clear that input is important to language acquisition; but no, it seems empirically false that output is necessary for acquisition, since some languages have potentially zero interlocutors. For instance, I can devise a formal language that serves inferences, know it’s correct (i.e. is consistent and/or complete), but have no one else actually understand it. That has been much the bane of certain people in mathematical revolutions, or to inventors of computer programming languages. But speaking of natural languages, ancient Chinese, Greek, Sanskrit, Egyptian, etc. don’t seem to fit this kind of acquisition, either, without really contorting what counts as “output.”
Yes, translation can be helpful, but that comes at the risk of false confidence – believing that a translation is correct because it happened to make sense at a given length, but then falling apart later down the line. Nearly 100% of all battles in hermeneutics take the form: “Well, the translation/interpretation held up until here. Should we adapt the translation/interpretation, or should we just say that the writing is inconsistent?” It seems like it could get much uglier if one didn’t get any feedback on his translations. Also, most people are ill-equipped to raise the kinds of challenges that are necessary to check for relevant counters to their own impressions of a given language’s grammar or the accurate senses to given words.
People can learn the meanings of words with just a few repetitions. What matters to the retention of terms and phrases is spaced repetition more than plain repetition, and even more than that are the initial intrigue that a person places on learning the terms, terms’ and phrases’ lexical, phonetic, syntactic, and orthographic proximities to one’s native or learned languages, etc.
But since this is a talk on motivation, I find it strange that no one has yet even really begun talking about the kind of motivation that is needed for long-term gains in any mentally demanding pursuit (like learning languages) (hint: it’s intrinsic). Best of luck finding any classroom in this godforsaken country (or any other, for that matter), which can actually instill it in you. The only automatic learning that will ever exist will be here just around the time that we can implant and integrate RAM into our brains.
[quote=“dan2006”]
Because of my more free schedule, I have time to go out and talk to locals to practice. But since I know my grammar is all wrong, and my vocab is limited, I feel self conscious and recently just stay at home resting or watching English movies. I guess for me the path of laziness allows me to do nothing and I feel comfortable, however what really is the point then of saying I am studying something I am not. Even language exchange friends speak better English than I do Chinese, and guess what, we end up defaulting to English again.
I have no idea what it is I need to do to get motivated here, so I am just spinning around in circles. I think there might be a bit of social anxiety in here somewhere too, the fear of looking foolish, making mistakes… Not sure if anyone has any suggestions or has experienced this before…??[/quote]
It took me far longer than most to get over my fear of making mistakes when speaking Chinese, 1.5 years of wasted opportunities for improvement, but the sooner you realise that perfection is an ideal, that no one cares that you don’t speak standard Chinese, that everyone has gone through the same issues, and that most people appreciate your effort and want to help, the sooner you will improve. It’s only through the opportunity to make mistakes that I progress. Still after a great deal of effort I often make the simplest of mistakes, like using a wrong tone which results in the waitress wondering why I need a lantern when what I thought I was asking for was a stool. It doesn’t matter, I got my stool and I’ll never forget the correct tone for that word again. My problems today are finding the opportunities to make mistakes, I still have little opportunity to use the language beyond a very basic level.
I have been very fortunate these past couple years to be in class sizes that average 3 or most recently only 2 students, with great teachers, which means we talk allot (unlike my part-time classes of 24+ where I didn’t talk at all), but the teachers suffer from the same politeness that you find on the street, in their effort to keep you talking and using the language, they all too easily forgive proper tones, pronunciation and often times sentence structure. I had gotten lazy and it was only after talking with a teacher in Shanghai, who basically told me my spoken Chinese sucked, did I realize how much work I had to do. I study with her and a student in Beijing and they don’t let a single poorly spoken sentence or word slip by. I mention this because you shouldn’t expect any class or teacher to meet all your needs, figure out your goals for learning the language, and find people to help you where the classroom teacher cannot. It’s easy to find tutors/teachers these days.
[quote=“ironlady”]Learning languages is mentally demanding.
Acquiring them isn’t.[/quote]
Don’t let brevity of the slogan throw you all. “Learning” means something very specific to this poster. She means “rule-and-task-based, meta-linguistic, one-shot learning,” or will even widen it to mean, “whatever learning I don’t endorse.”
What acquisition is, or whether there even is such a meaningful distinction beyond the one she forces above, is anyone’s guess.
An awful lot of people consider that there is a distinction between acquisition and learning in the case of languages. Given that it is mostly people who are good at learning who engage in that particular debate, it’s no wonder many of them deny it, because learning has never let them down in the case of languages. It does let down the majority of students who start out determined to become proficient in Mandarin. How’s that going for most of them doing it brute-force by conscious learning?
No, that’s not why. The matter for people who deny the acquisition-learning distinction is rather straightforward.
We can view the dispute from this vantage: Assume learning is Y. Is language acquisition X or Z?
The accusation among deniers is that people who hold the acquisition-learning distinction (who believe that language acquisition is Z) are simply not recognizing that their “acquisition” refers to types of learning. For almost everyone, “learning” describes those bodily processes that get someone from not being able to being able in some task. From that standpoint, It would be ludicrous to claim that “acquisition” were somehow disjoint from it.
In short, the deniers accuse them of selective redefinition, which renders their theory unfalsifiable, which is a bad thing from a scientific standpoint.
“Acquisition” may be somewhere on a sliding scale of the amount of conscious involvement in the learning process, where “super-conscious, analytical learning” is “learning” in their jargon, while “less conscious, learning through exposure” is “acquisition” in their jargon. Even then, “acquisition” would still be X.
Perhaps the easiest reaction against this reasoning is that it’s purely semantic, so to some “won’t matter.” But truth-functions are semantics, and truth matters; and also, initial semantics guides empirical research. Wrong categories, wrong paradigm.
For almost everyone, “deviation” means a couple of underage Asian boys in a supply closet, and a quick firing following a tense hearing before the board of directors. But those people are, if you will pardon the pun, laymen. There is a professional definition for this term, because the meaning of technical terms matters. For a statistician, “deviation” means something quite different. And for people who understand SLA, “acquisition” refers to a very specific sequence of events. ehopi (ehopefully) knows that. But heck, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to display a nice diagram and sling some verbiage?
Ehophi has it the wrong way around, and I don’t understand why everything about language has to always be a mathematics equation.
When talking about language learning, acquisition is unconscious or subconscious learning and learning (the way it is viewed by the “deniers”) is conscious" learning.
A much better description of your diagram would then be that Y is acquisition and x is learning.
Learning a language through conscious study and teaching is possible to a limited extent, but mastery of it would not be possible without all the other subconscious elements of learning necessary to become proficient. For that very reason it is not highly unlikely, but rather impossible, that someone would achieve complete control over grammar and vocabulary in a classroom alone. Studies show that students who read outside of the classroom (primarily) and to a lesser extent watch TV or listen to music when they have sufficient knowledge of the structure of the language, achieve much better control over grammar and vocabulary than those who try to do it through classroom study and homework.
When one reads a book in a foreign language (reading for pleasure not to study), is it conscious or subconscious learning? The answer is clearly subconscious learning. Therefore, while your diagram is accurate, your labels are wrong. Learning in the sense that it is used in language learning is a part of acquisition and not the other way around. That would also explain why teachers who focus more on true acquisition and less on learning achieve better results. Their “circle” is bigger.
Children to not really “learn” to walk in the same way we “learn” a language so certainly you can appreciate the fact that learning could have more than one meaning depending on its usage.
[quote=“E04teacherlin”]
Studies show that students who read outside of the classroom (primarily) and to a lesser extent watch TV or listen to music when they have sufficient knowledge of the structure of the language, achieve much better control over grammar and vocabulary than those who try to do it through classroom study and homework.[/quote]
Being a “denier”, I’d probably say students who have sufficient control/command of the structure, rather than knowledge (because the non-deniers will take that to mean “conscious understanding of how the rules work” rather than “the ability to apply them unconsciously and correctly”), but otherwise – yeah.
