I miss having a blog or thread for this class. The worst thing about having threaded discussions for classes is when you don't have anything to say, but you have to go through the motions so that the thread count is updated and you get credit.
The best thing about having threaded discussions is that one gets a chance to 'talk back' to the teacher and class without bogging down the whole class in a tangent that may not be generally useful.
This blog doesn't exactly make a threaded discussion but I still offer it up to folks who care to make use of the facility for discussions on the class topics.
Thinking Thursday: Digit Sums
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Writing to Learn Math: People learn math by playing with ideas. A math
journal can be like a science lab book. Do you want your children to
develop the abi...
10 hours ago
2 comments:
I am compelled burden you all with an unsolicited huzza from the trenches. Two things.
1) The textbook for 5030 “How languages are learned”, (Lightbown/Spada) is EXCELLENT.
So far I’ve studied the 1st two chapters in detail and skimmed the rest when they have been forward referenced in the 1st two.
The “theory intro practice” summary on page 49 is very well done and puts everyone from Skinner to Chomsky and beyond into a well considered perspective. KUDOS and a BIG THANKS to whoever picked this selection for reading, (Gavin?).
It may be that the book strikes me so hard because I’m a little more than halfway through the program and have the background needed to relate – I can’t judge that. It seems like the book would have been just as good on day one – but maybe not. I can say for sure that halfway through the program- this text pulls a lot of stuff together for me.
2) One the classes I’ve thought back to a lot while reading this text was Rachel’s Reality Spanish for Teachers (5835) that I took last fall. (Her class is only an elective, and, I haven’t taken the 5820 ESL methods class so maybe it will have the same impact.) I took her course to brush up my beginning Spanish a bit. The unexpected dividend from it is that because she is so determined to deliver the TPR (total physical response) style of training it becomes both a Spanish class and a practical lesson in applied TPR. Having taken her class, I have very good mental models for one of the primary methods discussed in the “How languages are learned” text. Well done Rachel.
Thanks for lending ear everyone, best wishes and may your Summer be endless!
(at the bottom of this musing is a question prefaced by caps)
In my archives I found my ALM style French text book, lab workbook and (German) ALM practice records together with a few graded exercises. I thought I would bring them to class for an historical exhibit. It's from fall semester 1974, French 101 at CU. The German records are from my High School class. Somehow the records were being tossed out, maybe we got new ones?
Noteworthy is the preface to the text and lab book explaining the method. In part it addresses the need to USE the language to learn it, to produce COMPREHENSIBLE conversation and to emphasize not individual words but phrases, aka CHUNKS. Compared to a Total Physical Response approach there are both similarities and differences. We seldom addressed grammar in the TPR class, but the accompanying CD and web pages (lingo lynx) did have vocab and grammar - it just took it out of the classroom and but the burden of the learning on you and your computer. It was as if the class was a interactive language lab with peer to peer conversation in stead of individual to tape practice. The interactive part was good and I liked the TPR method, the ALM approach had it's own way of getting you practice in a lab where you listened to a native speaker (recorded) and spoke back and were able to play back how you sounded. On the other hand, in practice the ALM classes always had some aspect of the learner producing language, I think everyone of them had periodic times when students would create and present a skit based on vocab up to that point - which is similar to what we did in the TPR approach.
My experience with the ALM in both High School and College in both (High School) French and German is that the 1st part of it, (the first year in High School), which focuses on conversation, is something I can succeed in. The 2nd step which focuses more on grammar always torpedoed me and I never got to a third step in school. I started learning French in elementary school in 5th grade - I think it was an experimental program – so I had 2 years of study pre-teen before my 9th grade French class.
I switched from liberal arts to engineering so I could graduate in math without meeting the language requirement!
In our Spader text the observation is made that the best learning is done when the motivated, extroverted, risk taking language learner engages in conversation with real people.
This is totally my observation as well. In my first job out of college (1977) I was given a group of French draftsmen to teach computer aided drafting to, this is when CAD/CAM was new (auto-cad hadn't been created yet). After two years here, I was sent to Paris for a year to work with the distributor as technical support to help our first customer (Matra) succeed and to find new customers.
After a year I was able to talk to people I knew and carry on a conversation. I could talk to strangers only if they had the patience to listen and negotiate meaning with me. My accent was pretty bad.
I have to say, that without the classroom learning I had - and I as a weak language student - I wouldn't have gotten as far with the language starting from scratch.
HERE'S THE QUESTION:
If using the language is the best solution, what is the next best thing to do when it's not possible to use the language in a real context every day?
Isn't the practice methodology with the ALM method the next best thing in many real circumstances?
And how about an language lab for people learning a foreign language that don't want to risk going into an unfamiliar place to learn? Could the ALM method using a language lab be a decent 2nd best accommodation?
Learning French in Quebec is one thing. Learning Spanish in Denver is maybe somewhat similar! But learning French in Denver? Sacre Bleu!
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