I had an odd thought today: why don't they teach foreign languages at a lower level? Right now the way languages seem to be taught is through word association. Gato == Cat, etc. Does this not strike anyone else as painfully abstract? Why not teach through something more intuitive, like pictures? When you learn languages through word association you are adding a layer of complexity and additionally introducing the possibility of mistranslation due to disparities in the semantic values of the words you are trying to link. Thanks to several years of learning spanish this way I find that, while I have reached a level of basic competence, I am quite slow to comprehend spoken phrases. When someone says "Donde esta el gato?" I go though this painstaking gato->cat-><cat imagery/associations> process.
I suppose that the achilles heel of this argument is that at a certain point I made a transition from thinking in terms of sense impressions to thinking linguistically. I would probably be forced to go through even one more step (parsing a sense image for it's english-language values) if someone said gato and showed me a picture of a cat. I don't know. Any thoughts, friends?
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This leads me to another random and interesting train of thought: is it possible to revert to thinking in terms of sense imagery without brain-damage, chemical intervention, or something equally extreme? I think not but I'm not sure.
-J
Arrggh! I'm silly. It just ocurred to me that that's probably what separates people who are good at visual arts from everyone else. I'm betting that they tend to think more in sensual terms than liguistic. The opposite would probably hold true for those people fortunate enough to be gifted writers. I guess people normally would fall somewhere in between. I'm a dweeb.
AH at work had this to add to the mix:
| Ah I have read your thoughts. I did take language pedagogy courses. There are many, many theories out there echo yours - or rather yours echo theirs. To my mind, it all revolves around grammar, but I am a traditionalist. You remember things you memorize, and soon you don't even remember that they are memorized. The more you get used to using vocab the more natural it becomes. I have found that in every instance, the more intuitive, picture/sensory based learning methods fail. Language is abstraction. This is not to say that audio/visual input is bad, but it all comes back to words,words, words. But then again, this all depends on the age of the person learning. Adults are too far past that basic first-learning stage of language development to benefit from pure memorization. They require hands-on implementation. Lots of input before they can out-put. Whereas children can converse in foreign languages easily - they can't even speak their own flawlessly so they are undaunted by odd words for the same things. I only think the way I do about language since this is how I have seen people repond to various techniques. Trying to teach people how to speak before they learn grammar is disastrous. There has to be a happy marriage. :) |
I've thought of the same thing. Mostly it hit me my sophmore year in college when I was doing very badly in German. There has to be a better way to teach language than through force feeding.
The weird thing is I've heard all this talk about innovative ways of teaching language used here at TU, but from what I've observed they're not doing anything that suggested any sort of paradigm shift at all. Just a lame ploy to bring in more students I suppose.
The worst part of it all is that I really wish I had "gotten it" when it came to German, but for some reason my brain just couldn't take the droning of words, phrases, and grammer over and over and over like busy work in grade school.
There has to be a better way...
Of course, how often do any of us land in a situation where it's necessary to use French or German or Spanish a lot? (Although considering the way population in the US is shifting, maybe Spanish is likely. But I digress.) I knew French pretty well, but I also used to wander the halls of my high school trying to have whole trains of thought in French, and I'd often root through the dictionary trying to find words for what I wanted to say and not just what I knew how to say.
I agree that the classic method of teaching is perhaps not ideal, but it does fairly well in giving a basis to build on. After all, grammar and spelling drills are also used to teach a language named English.