Review of language learning approaches

Here’s a brief little thang that some of you might like to read. Where are you? What approach is closest to your own?

hausarbeiten.de/faecher/haus … 20953.html

It’s no secret that I’m heavily into TPR, but I use a lot of the Natural Approach too.

The one difference is that I do not like the silent period at all…almost as much as I dislike mindless repetition of “What’s your name/ My name is Bunbun.”

I have found that kids and adults using TPR can and will speak comprehensibly from the git-go if the parameters of the lessons are well enough defined.

I can get my kids speaking/doing TPR rhymes and speaking simple sentences comprehensibly in class 1.

I mean, why wait??

I love Montessori. I realise that’s not a language teaching method, but I think it’s probably closest to TPR than anything else.

I like how clean their schools are. :slight_smile:

I use a variety of these methods, but I have to disagree about the silent period. I think that children, especially young children, learn a second language much like their first. A lot of their learning is done through absorption and it’s not necessary to force them to talk before they’re ready. However, I too hate the memorization of dialogues. Although the audio-lingual method has been used with great success by both the American Government (CIA) and the Mormon church. It seems to be an effective way of getting adults to learn a language for a specific purpose in a very short amount of time.

Who said force? My kids learn to speak at the same time they learn TPR and meaning. Takes all of 25 minutes.

Children shouldn’t be pressured into talking, but I do think that they should be encouraged to talk where possible. They will start talking at different stages and times, but they will start talking.

I am not a huge fan of silence. I’d rather save my voice. The great thing about TPR is that a child can show that they understand when perhaps they don’t know how to say the word. Some of my students can match words and pictures, do actions, follow instructions, but don’t yet have the ability to say the words. I can ask them to tell me what something is and they look like they don’t know, but they can show me the written word OR do an action to show me. Yes, one of my goals is to get them to talk, but sometimes I think that great thinking and comprehension skills in the beginning make for a better student once they do start speaking. Perhaps one lesson later they are able to say the words as well as other students.

I won’t put all my students on the same learning schedule - even though that is what many schools do.

This is what I love about TPR. It can be used with so many different levels and so many different structures. Even when I teach a multi-level class I can have more advanced students give the commands and lower level students follow. It keeps the class challenging and fun.

i don’t use the silent way in my teaching, namely for the lack of materials, but i would say don’t judge it too harshly unless you’ve seen it performed … it’s not really something you can describe …

yang lao shr (don’t know more about her name - sorry) has studied it extensively, and did a demo for us last semester. very interesting …

[quote=“xtrain_01”]I don’t use the silent way in my teaching, namely for the lack of materials, but I would say don’t judge it too harshly unless you’ve seen it performed … it’s not really something you can describe …

yang lao shr (don’t know more about her name - sorry) has studied it extensively, and did a demo for us last semester. very interesting …[/quote]

Do you mean Catherine Yang?

It’s not that I am not a fan of the silent appraoch…I’m just not a big fan of student silence.

i don’t like my students to be quiet either, but intially at least there is a point to not forcing them to produce output while their internal grammar is still processing …

affective filters and all …

[quote=“xtrain_01”]I don’t like my students to be quiet either, but intially at least there is a point to not forcing them to produce output while their internal grammar is still processing …

affective filters and all …[/quote]

“I have,” he said, twisting his mustache, “Conquered that problem.”

muawhahahah :smiling_imp:

I learned English for 7 years and I still feel I’m not ready to talk. :idunno:
IMO it is necessary to force/encourage students to talk.

RE: Silent Period
There isn’t a “silent period” in TPR in the same sense as some other methods where students aren’t all expected to start speaking for several lessons. TPR gets kids up and speaking quickly, you only let them have a few minutes of silence before you expect that they will start speaking. But I think there is a good point to the “silent period” idea, and for some students it can be what they need.

I had an experience with a girl who was new in my kindergarten class when I was at Hess (she had join the class about a month before I did), and she was really shy and withdrawn. She NEVER spoke in English, and I was worried that maybe she had a psychological problem or that perhaps she just wasn’t learning anything. But apparently she was active and talkative enough during the Chinese portion of class. So, I respected her silence and never forced her to speak English but always encouraged her to participate. And this lasted a couple months and I showed her concern, welcome, and gave no pressure to speak.

One day, she asked me for food when she was in the line for lunch. I was delighted. In no time she was asking every time, and suddenly, when I asked her a question from the lesson she gave an answer. Not only did she start speaking, she soon proved just how much she had learned during her silent period (which was a TOTAL silent period). Overnight she was one of the top students in the class. She had some shyness issues to deal with still, but clearly there weren’t any cognitive ones.

RE: My personal approach
Personally, I’m more of a cognitive-code/cognitive approach person, but I’m also a bit of an ecclectivist. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to have the freedom to really explore my own educational philosophy since I’m always required to follow what someone else wants (and they pay my bills), but I’ve seen a number of times where explicit grammar teaching just turns on the lights for a number of kids.

Baby’s learn almost purely on inductive principles. But as children mature, the deductive faculty becomes increasingly powerful. I think most methodologies I’ve seen focus too much on either one or the other. These systems can work, but I think it can be done faster.

RE: Mormon missionary language learning
As a former church member, I have an inside scoop on that. Audiolingualism was their major method after it was introduced, and the fact that they are being trained to read a dialog and anticipate and answer a fairly predictable set of questions lends itself well to this approach. But, instruction of missionaries is a bit more advanced than that. It more resembles the communicative method, with lots of task based instruction and unscripted dialogs. There’s also some influence from the cognitive-code method as well and they are also using CALL.

I thought this paragraph was interesting. Though there is no data to substantiate their claims, it would be something to say that a failure to provide grammar instruction would force children to remain at a low state forever. It also seems to run contrary to Piaget’s theory that children are unable to learn by grammar instruction until age 10-15.

I thought this paragraph was interesting. Though there is no data to substantiate their claims, it would be something to say that a failure to provide grammar instruction would force children to remain at a low state forever. It also seems to run contrary to Piaget’s theory that children are unable to learn by grammar instruction until age 10-15.[/quote]
I don’t think it actually is in conflict. Higgs and Clifford talk about a lack of corrective feedback in many of these proficiency oriented programs. Programs want kids to speak and they say “good job” even when errors are present. Kids aren’t told, “that’s not correct” but are encouraged just to express their ideas.

Corrective feedback doesn’t have to be overtly grammatical in nature. It just has to respond to errors and teach students that what they are saying is wrong so they don’t learn something wrong and then have to unlearn it.

My take on overt teaching vs. letting kids learn by example is that the more coginitively developed they are the more overt instruction is appropriate. As students’ internal grammars in their native language(s) become set they need more a more conscious role in developing a grammar for their second languages.

But even when they are too young to benefit from understanding grammar rules they still need corrective feedback. Going for fluency first and later accuracy is where the fossilization comes in.

I find that grammar can be taught subtly the whole way through a program, and correcting is but a small portion of it.

Everything or near everything the FT says is grammatically correct, and every story book they hear and read is 100% grammatically correct. That’s good grammar ed right there.

Grammar is not taught by identification of the grammatical status of a word, “no, Jimmy, fly is a verb and we want a noun, like…uhm, fly.” :laughing: It is taught at a deeper cognitive level, more mathematically, as in “what works.”

From the vocab they know finish this sentence: I like to eat______.

Some kid says fish…cool
some kid says hotdogs…cool
some kid says open…nope…try again…poop…ok bingo (why bother explaining that poop is a noun? That’s good is a good enough comment.)

TPR is okay in small amounts but it is a mistake to rely on it too much or build curriculum around it.

Blasphemy! :smiling_imp:

Okok…but can ya argue that TPR is not the best way to get things started? Can ya canya?? :slight_smile:

Our program is heavy on TPR for the first 2-3 months and tapers off out about 6 months, where we then continue to use it to introduce new vocabulary items before reading and in phonics classes to tighten listening skills.

Blasphemy! :smiling_imp:

Okok…but can ya argue that TPR is not the best way to get things started? Can ya canya?? :slight_smile:

Our program is heavy on TPR for the first 2-3 months and tapers off out about 6 months, where we then continue to use it to introduce new vocabulary items before reading and in phonics classes to tighten listening skills.[/quote]

I use sign language to get things started.

[quote=“jdsmith”]I find that grammar can be taught subtly the whole way through a program, and correcting is but a small portion of it.

Everything or near everything the FT says is grammatically correct, and every story book they hear and read is 100% grammatically correct. That’s good grammar ed right there.[/quote]
I agree.

I don’t agree. I think it can be taught that way, and some students benefit greatly from that sort of teaching.

Now, I don’t think grammar is acquired by that sort of thing, but for many students being told the underlying system simply works faster than having to figure out the rule themselves. The acquisition part still comes from being exposed to the correct form and practicing the correct form, but the initial overt learning can let them get straight to practicing what is correct.

Again, the more cognitively advanced the student the more likely overt explanation will help them learn faster.

I don’t know about you, but my math teacher gave me some pretty overt teaching as to what the rules were. Language is formulaic, like math. But, unlike math you’re working under a time constraint so it requires a much higher degree of automaticity. Your brain does the calculations and plugging things in much faster then you could consciously.

But for 2nd language learners they not only have to get more efficient at doing the calculations, they also have to figure out what calculations they need to make. Overt grammar teaching can help them figure out what formula to start practicing.