(no subject)

[owlectomy]

At the risk of oversimplifying a very complex and thoughtful debate on how second language acquisition works: there's a majority viewpoint that says it's really important to practice speaking, because you learn how the language works by trying to say something, and saying the wrong thing, and getting corrected, and learning the rule and how to apply it. And there's a minority viewpoint, which I happen to subscribe to, that says that it's much more important to hear a lot of language that you can understand, because that's how you build up a subconscious mental model of how the language works, and it's not productive -- maybe even counter-productive -- to spend time doing things like conversation practice if you haven't yet built up that mental model.

A class built on that model looks like this at the very beginner level: a lot of teacher talk, and very little student talk.

So it feels pretty weird for me to be in a relatively traditional class given that I don't believe relatively traditional classes work.

(Reasons I am in this class anyway:

1. I believe that I've acquired at least a fairly good chunk of the language, and therefore I'm at a point where getting more speaking practice can be pretty useful

2. It's cheaper than taking a Skype class from someone trained in TPRS, which is the method in the YouTube video

3. A good traditional teacher at least provides some comprehensible aural input, so at the low-intermediate level where the podcasts aren't working that well anymore (the ChinesePod intermediate podcasts just throw all this weird vocabulary at you when ideally they should be recycling a fairly small set of words) and TV is still too fast, that may be the best option.)

Weird, yeah, but it's not a bad thing. It means I don't really mind being corrected, because, meh, acquisition is slow and there's lots of stuff I haven't acquired yet, and it's not something that can be forced by drilling a rule a lot. It means that rather than getting impatient about the amount of review that we do, I just appreciate getting more easy comprehensible input, trusting that I'm going to do enough reading to broaden and deepen my vocabulary. I can treat it as an opportunity to practice speaking, and practice listening, without being locked into the idea that I can learn a language from going to a class for 90 minutes a week.

It's so expensive that I don't know how I would justify it for more than the 8 weeks I signed up for, but we'll see...

Comments

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I just beefed up standard classes by reading or listening to everything else I could get my hands on. I'd play the listening practice tapes overnight, for instance -- one I thing I discovered is that sleep-learning works quite well for me in that context.