Skip to main content

Speaking the target language or playing the CD?

First, this talk by Patricia Kuhl about child language acquisition, the brain and picking up sounds, is both interesting and occasionally amusing. But about eight minutes in she describes experiments carried out with American babies in which they are exposed to Mandarin either by human talk with toys, a video with pictures of toys, or just audio with a picture of a toy. Only when the babies interacted with humans did they learn to discriminate certain phonemes.



Now, it has often occurred to me that in the modern language classroom, students seem to prefer, and seem to understand better, language spoken by me rather than the CD.  I had assumed this was because I slow down a touch and emphasize certain words. I think I also had a hunch that students naturally prefer to listen to another person rather than a recording. So I wonder whether the preference which babies unconsciously demonstrate in language acquisition persists in later life, despite the brain's inferior language acquisition ability.

In any case, this might be an argument for teachers talking more, rather than playing the CD. For this, very good fluency and pronunciation skills are needed. The CD still has to be used so that students hear a variety of models and are prepared for the exam situation.

Teachers talking to kids is a little out of fashion these days, although it has been demonstrated that lecturing is the most efficient and effective way of transferring knowledge. In our subject area talking to classes is one of the most important things we do, and we should not shy away from it.

By the way, Patricia Kuhl has a number of talks posted on youtube.

Comments

  1. Interesting to read your comment concerning the efficiency of lecturing as a way of imparting knowledge. Spoke to a lecturer recently who felt his students were sated with Powerpoint and data projectors and has abandoned these tools in favour of speaking in fully-formed sentences and paragraphs. He says everyone's delighted.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I believe there is research evidence to support lecturing as a means of imparting knowledge. here is a reasoned essay about the advantages of the lecture format:

    http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ed-lect.html

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,