Hello Maverick! Thanks for the warm howdy.

The David I was referring to is indeed David Gjerdrum, the author of the post to which I replied. I met him in a tech context to be sure, but his most memorable aspects were his linguistic studies, involuted speech and inkhorn vocabulary. A most unforgettable character!

The points of my rambling comments on language acquisition were several. They may have been somewhat obscured by the 'steam of consciousness' style I fell into the day of my post.

You took my point about the unnaturalness of language teaching techniques indeed. What was less obvious was that I think that we cannot repeat our early linguistic learning context very well at all. This is true even if all the talk about a loss of linguistic plasticity is a heap of tripe.

The act of learning some language changes the state of our brains fully as much as 'natural' maturation processes. If we learned a new tongue the same as we learned our first, then it would have to go into a separate compartment and we would be hard put to even translate between the two.

The fact is that our minds insist on making connections with knowledge we have already acquired. When I learn new vocabulary the 'natural' way for instance I learn it in context from reading or hearing it.

Let me use an analogy. Consider a young sapling. Its growth is rapid in linear terms. From day to day you can see its progress. But when you look at a mature tree, it looks the same from day to day. This is quite deceptive. Its growth is spread out over a wide area. If you looked at the tips of the limbs, you would see a growth at the extremities much more like its youthful growth. And because there are so many such branches each of which is of the scale of the sapling, even at their slower growth rates, the overall absolute growth of the mature tree is much, much greater.

As long as one is actively engaged in reading a good quantity of material I believe the case of vocabulary acquisition is similar. By making small advances over a broad front, you may be surprised at how much you are really learning compared to when you were a youngling!

So the strategy behind my proposal was to find some way of connecting new linguistic facts about another language with what you already know. The other principle of learning that I was using was to go in tiny steps so that the process was relatively painless.

My proposal was motivated by my experiences with learning two languages: French and German. German I found more difficult. Both languages have those annoying gender inflections found so much less often in English. German word order I found difficult. By separating the order and inflection acquisition process from the vocabulary acquisition I am guessing that the way would be eased. By using familiar material progressively transformed, I hoped to make the steps of learning small and easy.

Another part of the process should be constant memory practice, otherwise known as testing. I think that we place altogether too much emphasis of the rating aspect of testing while ignoring its function of practicing access to what we have in fact stored. If you can successfully recall information on which you are tested, then you have practice remembering it. But, if you fail to answer the question, you get a different benefit. Now you have a question to which you do not know the answer and a greater readiness to receive information on that matter. So when you 'review' material, only part of it is review, the part of it you were or would have been able to answer. The other part of the review is what you did not pick up on the first time. Both aspects are useful in their own ways.

I believe that our whole approach to learning is flawed. I prefer the 100 percent mastery approach, where you learn all of the teaching objectives before progressing to the next phase. These phases of course should be much smaller than grade levels. The ability to follow such a procedure is much greater in contexts such as home schooling, which is probably why the results are so much better there as well as the exposure to other children at different stages of learning and their opportunity to act as teachers.

BraveLad


Markham Robinson,
CEO MasterPlan Financial Software
www.masterplanner.com