Chapter 7: Apply Conditions that Help Learning PDF

# Chapter 07: Apply conditions that help learning The aim of this chapter is to help you understand the learning conditions that lie behind many of the activities recommended for language learning. By understanding these conditions, you should be able to use these activities well. Knowing why you a...

# Chapter 07: Apply conditions that help learning The aim of this chapter is to help you understand the learning conditions that lie behind many of the activities recommended for language learning. By understanding these conditions, you should be able to use these activities well. Knowing why you are doing something can improve the way you do it. ## Learning Conditions - The more something is repeated, the more likely it is to be learned. - Repetition works best if it is spaced. Instead of having all the repetitions occurring together in a short time, there should be a reasonable amount of time between the repetitions. - As a word becomes better known, the spacing should get quite large, such as a space of several weeks or months. - Well-designed flash card programs apply the idea of increasingly spaced repetitions. - When we read, we also tend to get spaced repetitions. The effects of repetition are strengthened if quality of attention is added to each repetition. An important and easily applied way of adding quality is retrieval. Retrieval involves bringing something that you have met before back to your consciousness. For example, having heard the name of an object, a few minutes later you try to recall what that name was. Each successful retrieval strengthens the connection between the word form and its meaning. The more successful retrievals, the better the learning will be. Note that if you see a word and its meaning written together, this is not a retrieval, because you did not have to recall the meaning or the word. So, if for example you are about to look up a word in the dictionary and you know you have already looked it up before, it is good to spend a few seconds trying to recall its meaning before looking it up. One of the major reasons for using word cards or flash card programs as a way of deliberately learning vocabulary is that these techniques encourage retrieval. You see the word form and then have to try and retrieve its meaning, or you see the meaning and have to try and retrieve the word form. There is no set number of repetitions for learning to occur, but a minimum would be at least eight, and the more the better. - Another way of adding quality to a repetition is varied meetings and varied use. - Varied meetings involve meeting the same word again in reading or listening in different forms, different contexts, and different senses. - Different forms means that the word may have different endings such as plural compared with singular or present compared with past. - Different contexts means that the word occurs with a different grammatical function or in connection with different words from previous meetings. - Different senses means that the word is used with a slightly or rather different meaning that is still related to its core meaning. So far we have looked at repetition, retrieval, and varied meetings and varied use. Learning is also helped, at least for some learners, by associating visual images with language items and language use. When we use language to do things, this use has its visual associations and probably helps learning. One theory of learning, the dual coding theory, says that things processed visually and linguistically will be remembered better than those coded only in one of these two ways. Pictures however can have a negative effect if they distract too much attention from the language items that need to be learned. - Deliberate attention is also a major condition affecting learning ## Applying the Learning Conditions Because repetition is so important for learning, it is good to work out ways of repeating the same activities over and over again. This repetition should involve retrieval wherever possible and should be varied in small ways so that there is opportunity for varied use. Here are some ways of getting repetition. 1. Re-read a book you have already read before. 2. Listen to a book you have already read before. If the book is in electronic form, you can use a text-to-speech program to do this. Some web sites like Project Gutenberg have both written and spoken versions of the same text. 3. Do linked skills activities (See Activity 7.1). That is, write about what you have read, talk about what you have written. 4. Keep coming back to things that you did a few days or weeks ago. **Activity 7.1: Linked skills activities** Linked skills activities are among the most useful activities for language learning. They involve working with the same content material across three different skills, for example, reading a passage, then listening to the passage, and then writing about the passage. Because the same material is focused on, there are plenty of opportunities for repetition. Through this repetition the tasks become easier, so that by the time you get to the third part of a linked skills activity, this third part has the characteristics of a fluency development activity. The four skills include listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and in a linked skills activity, typically three of these four skills should occur. The success of a linked skills activity will depend on how closely the same content material is repeated in each of the three parts of the activity. ## Making the best use of a teacher While it is possible to learn a language by yourself, there are clear advantages in having a teacher. Let us look at the advantages of having a teacher by seeing what activities across the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing along with deliberate learning can benefit from having a private teacher. - For listening, the teacher can record texts for transcription. This means that you get well-pronounced listening input while trying to make sense of the language features. - A teacher is also very useful for helping and developing fluency with numbers, phrases and useful sentences (Activity 4.1 Memorized sentences or dialogues). - The teacher can also be a very supportive partner in communication activities which provide practice in both meaning-focused listening and speaking. - It is often useful to begin a lesson with such speaking particularly when the conversation draws on material covered in earlier lessons. - For speaking, in addition to conversation practice, you can talk with your teacher about your issues log (Activity 8.1), you can check the language in your prepared talks (Activity 4.3), you can practice pronunciation, and you can use the teacher as a source of useful phrases and sentences to memorize in order to gain fluency in elementary speaking. - You can also use a private teacher as your partner in variations of the 4/3/2 fluency development activity. The essence of this activity is repeated retrieval of the material that you want to practice, and, although you may have to repeat the same material to the same listener, the teacher, the teacher is likely to give you useful feedback after the activity, and also help you during the first delivery to correct what you are saying. - For reading, the teacher can help you with intensive reading (Activity 5.3), dealing with any reading problems that you have including understanding vocabulary and grammar points. - For writing, the teacher can provide feedback on your writing, helping you correct important written texts that you may often need to produce. Private teachers are likely to come with their own lesson plans and ideas of teaching, and it is useful if you can guide the teacher to some degree by making sure that you get a balance of opportunities for learning across the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. If you are not working with a private teacher, but are part of a foreign language class, it may be useful to see if the teacher is willing to run part of the class at least using a negotiated syllabus. A negotiated syllabus exists when the teacher and the learners negotiate with each other to decide how they will make use of the class time. The typical way of introducing a negotiated syllabus is for the teacher to teach the course for a few days or weeks, and then get the learners to recall the kinds of things that have been done in class over that period of time and list them on the whiteboard. The teacher then says that you have seen what we can do in class but now I want you to talk with each other and then to talk with me to see what you would like to do over the next week or two. The resulting discussion will be more practical if the teacher puts a blank timetable on the whiteboard. This makes the learners see that they can't just have an unlimited list of suggestions but have to fit them into the time available for the class. After negotiating the various suggestions, the teacher then puts the suggestions into practice in the following week or two weeks, and then at the end of that time the negotiation can occur again. Such negotiation makes sure that the class activities and content are meeting the learners' needs, and a negotiated syllabus can provide very useful feedback for a teacher. ## Learner One of the major problems with a negotiated syllabus is that learners are often not aware of the full range of possibilities that can occur when learning a language. By reading this book, I hope that you are now aware of such possibilities, and thus could play a very useful and informed part in negotiating a syllabus. Not all teachers may welcome learners playing an active part in deciding what should be taught and how it should be taught. On the other hand, many teachers will welcome it, because it makes their job easier and ensures that the learner or learners will be satisfied with the classes. ## How necessary is a teacher? The teacher's most important job is to plan so that there is a balance of opportunities for learning across the four strands, and so that the most useful material is met at each stage of learning. Learners can do this planning themselves, but they need to know about the language they are learning. A well-informed teacher can be a big help here. The teacher's next most important job is to organize. According to the principle of the four strands, three-quarters of the learning time should be spent using the language for communicative purposes (meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, fluency development) at the level which most suits you. A teacher can play an important part in choosing and organizing the activities which provide this communicative activity. When learning one-to-one with a private teacher, the teacher can be a very supportive communication partner. A teacher is particularly useful when doing language-focused learning. The teacher can provide correct models of pronunciation and grammatical use to copy. The teacher can also provide feedback on errors, explain words and grammar difficulties, and model appropriate language use. The teacher can also provide useful cultural information. Overall, a good teacher is of great value when learning a language. However, a well-informed learner can do many of the teacher's jobs, and a goal of this book is to help learners become more informed about language learning. In the next and final chapter of this book, we look at the fourth principle, which involves keeping engaged with learning the language.