Krashen teaching methods challenged.

Several grammar purists have been attacking my language learning ideas, and those of Stephen Krashen. It is worth reading the comments to my post about Stephen Krashen, made by Nickzi, Anton and Jason.

Here is my answer. It is a bit long to leave as just a comment.
........................................................................................................................

First let's look at what fluency in a language means. My definition can be found in a document that is a few years old, called The Linguist Manifesto. Fluency does not mean perfection. Perfection in another language is an illusion, but we can all achieve fluency. We can always improve. As long as we are communicating effectively we are fluent. I have a Russian employee who communicates very well in English, but will never lose his accent and never get the articles right. I know Swedes who are effortless in English and say "it is many people" rather than "there are many people", and Germans who say they have lived in Canada "since many years" instead of "for many years" and on and on. I doubt if explanation or grammar study will change them. Yet they are fluent.

Anton, I do not know where you got the idea that I dislike having my fluency questioned.  You state that without an understanding of the aspect of verbs one cannot know Russian. Nonsense. I have no real sense of the aspect of verbs, even after reading the explanations. This feature does not exist in English and my brain is not yet ready to understand it. In time it will. But you cannot say that I do not know Russian. I am very happy with my Russian.

My goal in Russian is to understand it, and I understand literature and news sites like Echo Moskvi. I am held back only by a lack of vocabulary, not by a lack of grammar understanding. When I do run into Russians and speak Russian, I am able to communicate satisfactorily, and get compliments on my Russian. If I had a month in Russia, I would speak a lot better, but I have progressed much faster listening and reading and using LingQ, than the students at universities who study grammar. I  do want to improve and speak more accurately but I know I will get there faster my way then by trying to force grammar into my head. I will occasionally review the grammar, accept the fact that it is all unclear, and that the variations are simply too many to remember, and then go back to enjoying the language. In any case it is still words, and not grammar rules, that are holding me back.

I do not deny that some people can learn languages differently from the way I do, but my experience tells me that these grammar keeners are few and far between. Certainly I, and many of the peope that I have met, are not among them.  I avoided grammar explanations in my study of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, just to name a few. I made good progress.

Most people I know have trouble understanding grammar explanations, with all their exceptions, and they have even more trouble remembering them. This grammar learning, "work", as Anton calls it, is to most people, an inefficient, boring and discouraging way to learn languages. People who struggled with "transitive and intranstive  verbs", rules on "modals" and all the rest, just improved by leaps and bounds when they came to LingQ to improve their English.

I have no use for grammar perfectionists and academic linguists. I have no interest in the many terms and labels they invent to describe language, as if these terms can make language seem like science or mathematics. These people are not only a waste of time, they are an impediment to language learning. I am interested in what enables a lot of people to learn languages, not in linguistic pedantry.

There are many examples of the lack of success of traditional language teaching, and most school learners will confirm this to me. In one famous example from New Brunswick, there were two schools teaching English to francophones. One had a teacher and traditional program, and the other just let the children listen to and read stories. The children in the second school performed better after two years.

Jason, your comments on Mandarin are groundless. I learned Mandarin by listening and reading and focusing on phrases, and ignoring grammar explanation. After 8 months I passed the British Foreign Service Exam in Mandarin.

The key is lots of input, and that means putting in a lot of time. If the method of study is enjoyable we will put in the time needed to progress.And if we learn naturally through a lot of input, we manage to remember what we learn. In fact a number of LingQ members have observed that their language skills improve even when they are away from the language. This is pemanent learning. When we learn grammar rules and tables, we only remember them for a short period of time.

To understand why this is so, I recommend you read up on how the brain learns. I particularly recommend Manfred Spitzer's book called Learning, The Human Brain and the School for Life.

Comments

[AJ]

Steve,

Nice post! I've talked to grammer purists with similar views on language learning and heard them speak English, one of the foreign languages they supposedly speak well. Many of them have an accent thicker than that of the athletes who come to the states to compete, and some long-winded sentences they produce sound foreign, even though they might be "grammatically" correct, whatever that means...

These people should really put their money where their mouth is and record a video of themselves speaking the languages instead of blabbering nonsense.

Just a few words about myself that might be relevant here. I'm a software developer with an advanced knowledge of math and I'm a master-level chess player. I'm strongly convinced that we learn to UNDERSTAND math and chess the way we acquire languages.
The way our brain learns is by working out the rules when it's provided with sufficient input and experience. I beleive this process is universal.

[Mitch]

Steve et al:

If you have time, take a look at the following website:

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about

There's a bit of navigating to do--click on "OK, let’s get into it!" at the bottom--but the info is fascinating. It is written by a adult who taught himself Japanese in 18 months--in Utah. Including writing. Enough to interview in Japan and land a job with a Japanese company in Tokyo.

His main points:

1. The belief that I could become fluent in Japanese
2. Constantly doing fun stuff in Japanese

He obviously spent more time than most, but not at the expense of his "real life." And not by grammar, but by massive input before output. And yes, he credits Krashen.

[Art]

Hello, Steve!

This is Art from Moscow. You have stirred quite a disturbance with your last posts on language acquisition vs learning a language.

As you may know, I had found the Dr. Krashen web site and learned about his theory before I found your system (at that time The Linguist). If I'm not mistaken, it was me who gave you links to his web site. But enough of boasting. :-)

At the end of last year I took an IELTS test (International English Language Testing System). My result is: 8 for listening, 7 for reading, 6.5 for writing and 6.5 for speaking. The overall band is 7. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ielts for the Band Scale description (as well as of the test itself).

And now goes the funny part. Before the exam I went to a major local language school here in Moscow and asked them if they could prepare me for the exam. They said "of course, we are the best in it in the whole world" and other blah-blah and gave me their preliminary language test (based mostly on the knowledge of grammar) to determine my level of the English language because I had never learned English neither in schools, nor in language schools before. After the preliminary test they said that I could hope only for 5 or 5.5 band, no more -- and even so I should get their crash course to get those 5s (for about $1000/month). And they said there were no ways I could get 7s I was aiming to. In response, I sang a few lines from Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_bvT-DGcWw) and went to prepare on my own.

My only preparation was reading about the format of the test and listening to the BBC because IELTS is a British test and I get used to American accents.

As you see I eventually got my 7s. So, listing to and reading a lot of what interest you works.

"We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all its just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
............"

:-D

Best,
Art

[Gregory]

cool post :-)

www.gregory.hk

[Roy]

The following is just my opinion - one which I do not claim any reference of holding any established or reputable position in the linguistic community. I have only arrived at my point of view from my work with computers, software and artificial-intelligence and neural networks:

So with those caveates, I begin. I would speculate that...

Language and human thought are almost one and the same. One cannot exist without the other. One cannot learn a language without needing to think in it and vice versa.

Which brings me to my first postulated law of language: All languages communicate human thought. That is their principal purpose.

The second law of language is this: Each language can be learned through the act of associating the act of thinking with the corresponding parts of the language that transmit that thought - be it aural or written.

Before grammar books existed, languages were being passed down from generation to generation, mother to daughter, father to son. This is the way the overwhelming majority of speakers of any language have learned to communicate.

A chicken vs egg scenario would be this: How did the first grammar writers arrive at their rules of grammar if grammar was necessary to learn the language? They would have had to learn the language somehow. If grammar was indeed necessary for language acquisition to take place then surely a grammar book must have been written by higher powers? Or, in fact, even before that - the problem that most of the world - excluding most of the present-day first world - would be largely illiterate. A "lower" command of the language, then, you would think is possible only via verbal instruction.

Grammar is, indeed, a wonderful tool. It is a "shortcut" if you will at the way a language behaves. These observations made by wonderful individuals throughout the ages can be very useful to the language learner from a logical and analytical perspective. However, the neural network structure that the brain constructs cannot be "spoon fed" secret shortcuts in the form of grammar rules- although it would be wonderful to think it is possible.

The amount of information processed by the brain far outstrips the basic language and vocabulary that we believe to be so vitally important in "learning" a language. The brain does far, far far more than store these primitive references to meaning that we believe to be so important. Lip movement, the aural frequency of the words, the juxtaposition of word groups, phrases, predictable sentence structure, typical sentence constructions, typical mal-formed sentence structures - all of this surrounds the initial purpose of language: the transmission of human thought from one person to another. The networks grow to such immense sizes with great complexity that would be beyond the conscious human mind to understand at any one instant, yet many of us doggedly stick to grammar instruction as some form of complete and pure method which is above that of anything else.

Elitism. Nothing more.

By 2025, if Moore's Law continues to hold steady, the average home computer would be of sufficient calculative ability so as to simulate the human brain. One day, hopefully within our lifetimes, through the wonders of technology, they will be able to unlock exactly how the human brain learns and processes language. We already have a fairly good number of theories that we put into practice in areas like artificial intelligence, neural network strategies and the like- which I studied during my days at Macquarie University. We will be able to then say, without any doubt, that grammatical instruction is not directly effective in language acquisition - but, like conscious awareness of aiding in the "understanding" of the language from an analytical perspective, may be able to hasten the brain's ability to construct the neural network as it continues to observe the natural language and aide in it's ability to assign the proper understanding to various aspects of the language.

Unfortunately, too much emphasis is placed on grammar instruction- more should be placed on a massive amount of understandable input that communicates meaning of which the majority is understood by the learner. I believe that both have their place in helping language learners arrive at their goals. Grammar is good at "projecting" a more complete understanding of a language for reasons of proof reading, editorial or written works- even if the spoken portion of the language may not benefit as much, if at all, as such knee-jerk reactions have always and will always be NOT from grammatical instruction but via the brain's neural network which, in the process of having been exposed to proper language structures, have an "inherent" automatic built-in observance of grammatical rules autonomously through the same synapse reinforcement technique that fuels all other types of brain activity. It is just quite simply the way we learn.

Speaking is a very emotive task and requires reflexive memory. The same type of memory as driving a car or walking. The higher order memory where grammatical rules can be "envisioned" by the speaker only interfere with the speaker's ability to concentrate on "meaning".

Therefore, well learned grammatical rules are best put to use when writing or correcting someone else's writing - where the grammatical rules can be formulated in the conscious mind and applied - where meaning does not need to be "held" in suspended animation in the thoughts of the speaker continuously.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Roy,

This is a wonderful explanation and you should really be a guest writer on my blog. I wonder if enough people read the comments. They should read this piece.

[Vic Webster]

I read this post with interest.

I'd just like to make one point and I'd be interested to hear feedback.

I agree with you, it maybe impossible to "perfect" any language, even your own (even "perfecting" your native language would involve learning the exact definition of every word in existnece etc.)

However, it's certainly possible to learn a language as well as a native speaker. I confidently make that statement because my ex-girlfriend (Swedish) spoke such perfect English that she made it a common (and slightly annoying habit) of correcting my english (which only proves my first paragraph, I guess...).

Not only that, but she spoke with such a perfect Australian accent, that on arriving in London everyone just assumed she was Australian.

I was also interested to note that after four months in London, she spoke with a perfect (to my ears) English accent. All traces of the Aussie accent had dissapeared.

In comparison, I completely retained my Australian accent despite 18 months in the south of Ireland.

I'd be interested to hear any comments.

[Grammar Teacher]

Your method for learning languages is how a young child learns and what could be better than that because it obviously works for them! It's also much more fun than the totally structured way although that does have some uses.