How to learn not what to learn

Here is the podcast.

I occasionally follow a forum for teachers of English. Recently there has been considerable discussion about whether or not to teach cultural elements in English, and which ones. There have also been discussions on which vocabulary should be taught when, the importance of word frequency in vocabulary learning. In the past I have seen discussion about which elements of grammar to teach when.

I feel that these teachers are missing the point. The issue is not what to teach. The issue is how to learn. The teacher should not decide for the learner what he or she should learn; what subjects to read or listen to; which aspects of the culture to learn; which words and phrases to learn; etc. The learner should decide this.

The teacher should encourage the learner to be independent, and to discover the language on his or her own. The teacher should make it easier for the learner to do this. The teacher should encourage the learner and provide feedback, always with the goal of making the learner an effective, motivated independent learner. In other words the teacher should focus on teaching the learner how to learn languages.

Here is what I posted on this forum.

Perhaps the issue of word lists and cultural competency is best addressed as part of the same issue. Should we not focus more on HOW to teach, or HOW to help the learners to learn, rather than on WHAT to teach?

What if we let the learner choose content of interest from a large library or corpus? What if we help the learner by ranking the content by the % of unknown words? What if we allow learners to choose the words they want to learn and save and provide information on the importance of these words based on frequency, but let them make the choice?  What if we let them save the phrases they want, and let them ask the teacher about these words and phrases? What if all this information is part of a growing personal database of words and phrases that will be different for each learner? What if techniques like Flash Cards and cloze tests are then applied to these individual databases?

In that way the learner chooses what to learn. The teacher helps the learner by explaining, providing feedback, asking the learner to use these words and phrases and providing more feedback. The teacher focuses on the HOW to learn, not the WHAT to learn.

Of course I was describing some of the things we are doing at LingQ.

Comments

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

Steve,

How are your questions relevant to what is being taught in class? They are very good questions for learner-directed learning, but in the class a teacher has to chose some method relevant to all 5 or 10 students.

And even LingQ seems to implicitly make decisions on which words are worth learning by nominating some of them 'priority lingq'. While I am free to ignore those words, how is your judgement of what is important (frequency in English?!?) differs from the subject of the discussion you witnessed?

As to example of the sequence, in my class, the teacher decided to teach a particular (more difficult) tense of Spanish earlier than the book recommended. He felt we needed more absorption time with it than would be possible if the tense was taught in the end of the course.

Now, what would be nice if after deciding learning direction, the target texts and priorities on words could be dumped into LingQ and have students progress with their own strategy towards that clear goal. WordChamp does something similar to that, but obviously with different methodology to LingQ.

P.s. It would be nice to see the link to the forum thread to let those interested to follow more than one salvo of the conversation.

[Steve]

Alexandre,
1) Do you have or would you like a Beta account in LingQ to work on your Spanish?

2) Of course LingQ does tell the learner about the relative frequency and therefore the importance of words based on this criterion. For the very high frequency words, these really should be learned first. After that it depends on the interests of the learner. He/she is free to learn what he/she wants. Our learners can create a variety of lists of words and phrases by tagging and other methods, and they study what they want when they want. Their choice of content will also dictate what words, and cultural elements they are learning.

3) If you have a LingQ account you can save any text you want into LingQ and learn any words or phrases or phrase patterns you want, whenever you want. Frequent listening to these contents will reinforce your sense of how these patterns work in your target language.

I did not understand your P.S.

[George Dick]

The P.S. was asking for a link to the original forum conversation you are describing above...

[Steve]

Oh. Here is the link.this is a List-serv which you would need to join.

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/~tesl-l/

[Ilya]

I would be glad if Steve or Alexandre or anyone else familiar with both the WordChap and the LingQ could characterize the two systems in a comparative way, ignoring many details. I have had a look at the WordChap just now. On the first glance the core of the WordChap is like the core of LingQ. I see no much difference in the methotologies. What is common, both the system work with any text that the user chooses. Both the systems seem to me a combination of an online dictionary with the means to study (mostly to review) words and phrases. Thanks.

[ilya]

In my comment, I meant WordChamp rather than WordChap. Sorry. Anyway, you click, and it saves what you click upon into your database, flash-cards it, etc.

[Steve]

Ilya,

I have no idea how Wordchamp works. If someone is a member of Wordchamp I would be interested in hearing. Any language learning site is a community of people. Some people will prefer one or another of these sites. We are constantly working to make our functionality more effective, as in the development of LingQ, but in the end it is the community.

[Ak]

Steve...wordchamp is a freeware program...it requires you to register first....you can check the system out by yourself. It is not my cup of tea, though. It slows down your reading activity. Plus you have to choose the best definition for an unknown word by yourself out of many close words. For me, programs like supermemo works like a charm. Different strokes for different people.

[Ak]

To Steve:(you can answer to my question in another blogpost or probably over here).

I hear a lot from many people (infact from you as well) that for learning a language one has to be exposed to a copious amount of input in the target language. My question is, how much is required minimally: Can we narrow it down?
for example, 10 novels, 20 books on a variety of subjects, 300 hours listening?

I want to know how many noevls have you read so far in French? How many other types of books? Is there anyway you can tell me?
I would like to know an answer to this question so I'd know where I currently stand in terms of accumulating input. Is there any way for you to connote this minimum requirement for functioning as an intelligent learner of a language?

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

Steve,
1)Thank you for the offer, I've had LingQ account for nearly a month now. Even contributed some feedback on its blog.

2)What is that relative frequency based on? From what I can see, it was based on English words (Academic Word List?). How does that apply to learning (say) Spanish?

Also, I was not able to find your discussion at the tesl-l list, though I do see your posts from May. Could it have been somewhere else?

July (and others interested),
I have put my comparative review of LingQ and WordChamp in a separate entry on my blog. I also described how you could combined the two together.

[Steve]

Alexandre,

1) TESL-L List-Serve has not accepted by latest submission, or at least they are still reviewing it.

2) Our importance indicator (****,***,**,and*) is based on the frequency with which words appear in our library. Since there are well over 2000 items in the English library the indicators for English are quite accurate. We are just getting started with our Spanish library for example, and therefore the indicators for Spanish may be less accurate.

In future we will let users adjust the importance indicator, or choose to base it on the frequency in their own library of content. That will be in the next version though.

I will study your comparison of Wordchamp and LingQ and provide some comments later. Thanks.

[ilya]

Hi Alexandre,

Thanks a lot for your thorough comparison between WordChamp and LinqQ. I was pleasantly surprised to find many things on your blog that are also of great interst to me. In particular, I have read your paper written for TeleRead about e-books for language learning.

Some time ago I also concluded that e-books for language learners, both their format and their functionality,should be different from e-books for the native speakers. Unexpectedly for myself, I then set up to prototype a version of such a book. I try to focus on the ease of reading such a book and on grasping the meaning of new words and phrases in large amounts, more than on the means to review the new words and phrases.

Would you be agreeable to discuss this project? Could you please refer me to other material similar to your paper in TeleRed.

Thank you.