Ch 5.pdf Language Learning Strategies PDF

Chapter Balance your learning–do deliberate study 05 of language features Deliberate learning is very efficient and effective and so it is worth doing it. This deliberate learning can involve the teacher teaching, but it must also involve you as the learner ta...

Chapter Balance your learning–do deliberate study 05 of language features Deliberate learning is very efficient and effective and so it is worth doing it. This deliberate learning can involve the teacher teaching, but it must also involve you as the learner taking responsibility for your own learning. What deliberate learning should you do? You need to organize your own deliberate learning. The most important deliberate learning activity is using word cards (see Activity 5.1). You need to take control of this very effective activity and keep using it to learn new vocabulary and even more importantly to keep revising previously met vocabulary. You may find that some teachers advise against using this strategy largely because of the belief that all vocabulary learning needs to occur in context. They are wrong. It is important that there is vocabulary learning in context through meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, and fluency development, but it is also important that there is deliberate decontextualised learning through the use of word cards, because such learning is very efficient and effective. Some people also believe that because word card learning involves first language translation, it encourages thinking in the first language rather than the foreign language. Research however has shown that in the beginning and intermediate stages of language learning the first and foreign languages are unavoidably stored together. Using bilingual word cards is a very effective deliberate learning strategy that you should use. As well as word card learning, you should also use concordancers to study words and grammar (see Chapter 2), you should do dictation, transcription, delayed copying, and oral repetition activities to gain familiarity with spoken and written forms, and you should do intensive reading preferably using an electronic reader such as Kindle so that there is easy word look-up. 28 Activity 5.1: Word cards Using word cards to learn vocabulary is just one step in learning a word. Using word cards is a deliberate learning strategy and fits into the language-focused learning strand of a course. 1. Write the word to be learned on one side of a small card and its translation on the other side. This encourages you to recall the item after the first meeting. Each recall strengthens the connection between the form of the word and its meaning. Seeing them both together does not do this. 2. In the beginning, start with small packs of cards -- about 15 or 20 words. Difficult items should be learned in small groups to allow more repetition and more thoughtful processing. As the learning gets easier, increase the size of the pack -- more than 50 seems to be unmanageable simply for keeping the cards together and getting through them all in one go. 3 Space the repetitions. The best spacing is to go through the cards a few minutes after first looking at them, then an hour or so later, then the next day, then a week later, and then a couple of weeks later. This spacing is much more effective than massing the repetitions together into an hour of Because it will study. The total time taken may be the same but the result is different. Spaced repetition results in longer lasting learning. 4. For words which are difficult to learn, use depth of processing techniques like the keyword technique (see Note 5.1). Think of the word in language contexts and situational contexts. Break the word into word parts if possible. The more associations you can make with an item, the better it will be remembered. 5. Make sure that words of similar spelling or of related meaning are not together in the same pack of cards. This means days of the week should not be all learned at the same time. The same applies to months of the year, numbers, opposites, words with similar meanings, and words in the same set such as items of clothing, names of fruit, parts of the body, and things in the kitchen. These items interfere with each other and make learning much more difficult. 6. Keep changing the order of the words in the pack. This will avoid learning where the meaning of one word reminds you of the meaning of the next word in the pack. 7. Say the word aloud to yourself. This helps the form to enter long term memory. 8. Write phrases or sentences containing the words on the card too where this is helpful. This particularly applies to verbs. Some words are most usefully learned in phrases. Chapter 5 / 29  Note 5.1: What is the keyword technique? The keyword technique is a very effective and well researched way of helping remember vocabulary. It involves the following steps. Step 1: Think of a word in your first language (or another language you know) that sounds like the L2 word or the beginning of the L2 word. This is your keyword. Step 2: Think of an image involving the meaning of the L2 word and the meaning of the meaning of the keyword. It is important that you actually visualize this image in your mind. So, the keyword technique has four parts. (1) The new L2 word (2) The keyword (3) The image involving the L2 word and the keyword. (4) The meaning of the L2 word. In the following examples, the four parts are numbered to match the four parts of the technique. If you are Indonesian and you want to remember (4) the meaning of (1) parrot, then you can use (2) the Indonesian word parit meaning “ditch” as the keyword. You then (3) imagine a parrot in a ditch. So the keyword performs two functions: to provide a form link, e.g. parit-parrot, and to provide a meaning link ‘parrot’-‘ditch’. If you are Thai and you want to learn (1) the English word council, then you can use as (2) the keyword the Thai phrase khâaw săan which means ‘uncooked rice’. You think of (3) the meaning of uncooked rice in an image with the meaning of council, as in the picture. This then helps you to attach (4) the meaning of council to the form council. The keyword technique works because it makes you process more than one feature of a word and this processing is not shallow in the way that exact repetition is shallow. The only limit is your imagination! The keyword does not have to sound exactly like the foreign word to be learned, and it does not have to be like all of the word. If the form of the keyword is like the beginning of the foreign word, then that is usually enough. In research, the keyword technique typically results in 25% more learning than other deliberate learning activities. (adapted from Nation, I.S.P. (2008). Teaching Vocabulary: Strategies and Techniques. Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning) 30  How can you learn multiword phrases? Words typically occur with other words to make up phrases. Most of these phrases have a meaning that is closely related to the meanings of the words that they contain, for example, next week, six o’clock, strong tea, in a minute. For some phrases, the relationship between the meaning of the phrase and the words it contains is not quite so clear, but there is still a strong connection. For example, kill two birds with one stone, see the light at the end of the tunnel, you know, for instance, think about. For a small number of phrases, the meaning of the parts has no obvious connection with the meaning of the whole, for example, at all, of course, as well, by and large, raining cats and dogs. There are many words to describe these various kinds of phrases such as idioms, collocations, multiword units, figuratives, and lexical bundles. However, what is important about all the various kinds of phrases is that it is worth giving some deliberate attention to them as phrases, because this will help towards more accurate and fluent use of the language. There are several ways of giving this attention. 1 Work out how the meanings of the parts relate the meaning of the whole. For phrases and clauses that have a figurative meaning, this may involve seeing the connection between the literal meaning and the figurative meaning. For example, gave me the green light has the literal meaning of seeing a green traffic light. Its figurative meaning is getting permission to move forward. 2 Look at the form of the phrase. About 20% of phrases in English make use of alliteration (words beginning with the same sound), such as leading light, baby boom, head held high or some other sound connection such as similar vowel sounds (blue moon), rhyme (when the cat’s away, the mice will play), repetition (by and by), and partial rhyme (last gasp). 3 Think about and find out about the history of the phrase. Where do toe the line and cut and run come from? Just as words differ in their frequency of occurrence, so do phrases. Some are very frequent and a much larger number are not so frequent (see Note 2.1: Are all words created equal?). You can check to see how frequent a phrase is by using a concordancer (see Chapter 2). Chapter 5 / 31  Is it good to learn related words together? Although it seems like a good idea to learn related words at the same time, whether it is helpful or not depends on the relationship between them. Words like near synonyms (embarrass-humiliate, prevent-protect), opposites (hot-cold, long-short), and members of a lexical set (days of the week, colours, the names of fruit, articles of clothing, parts of the body) are best not learned together. The effect of learning them together is so strong that it can make learning 50% to 100% more difficult. Being 100% more difficult means that it would take twice as many repetitions to learn these words compared to learning unrelated words. It has been suggested that where the related words are nouns, objects which are nearer to each other in shape, apple-orange, are more likely to interfere than objects which are different in shape, banana-orange. The relationship that helps learning is where the words are related as if in a story (frog, pond, green, slimy, hop, croak). So, it is a good idea to note words from your reading onto word cards as these words are unlikely to be members of the same lexical set. When learning items that are similar to each other there is not only the difficulty of learning the items but also the difficulty of not mixing them up with each other. If the words also have some formal similarities this can make interference even more likely. We are more likely to confuse Tuesday and Thursday than Tuesday and Sunday because Tuesday and Thursday begin with the same letter and both contain s and day. The way to reduce the effects of interference is to learn possibly interfering items at different times, not together. Activity 5.2: Transcription Transcription involves getting a recording of a short spoken text on a relevant topic and replaying it many times while trying to make a written version of it. The text should only be around 100 words long. It is best to choose a spoken text where you can get a written version to check and correct what you have transcribed. When you re-listen to the text it is OK to pause its playback and focus on parts of the text. This deliberate learning activity improves listening skills and provides useful feedback on word and phrase recognition. 32 Activity 5.3: Intensive reading Intensive reading is a way of deliberately focusing on language features as they are used in context. Intensive reading involves working your way slowly and carefully through a text with the help of a dictionary. Your goal is to gradually understand the text by working out the meaning of the parts you do not understand at first. The activity can be done alone, or with the help of another learner, or with the help of a teacher. Often translation is used as a way of clarifying parts of the text. Another way of doing intensive reading, especially for learners working alone, is to do repeated reading paying attention to different aspects of the text on each repetition. For example, the first reading could focus on the unknown vocabulary in the text and on comprehension. The second reading could focus on useful multiword units that could be used productively in later speaking or writing. The third reading could focus on the use of some of the function words in the text, such as prepositions or articles. The value of this intensive repeated reading is that when we read our main focus is on the meaning and thus largely the content words. When we are familiar with the content, we can then give our attention to how the language is being used to convey messages, and this kind of attention is very useful for language learning. This kind of repeated attention with a change of focus is also worth doing while listening, such as when watching a recorded TV program or a movie. Activity 5.4: Delayed copying Choose a useful and relevant text around 200 words long (about 20 lines). Read to understand it with the help of a dictionary if necessary. Then look at the first four or five words in the text, try to hold them in your memory, and then copy them down onto a piece of paper without looking back at the text. As you work your way through the text copying it, try to hold longer sequences in your head. The benefit of the activity comes from trying to hold longer and longer phrases in your head before you write them down. This deliberate learning activity improves handwriting skills and memory for phrases. Chapter 5 / 33  Activity 5.5: Spelling practice If the language you are learning uses a writing system or a spelling system that is very different from that of your first language, it is worth giving some deliberate attention to the writing system. An effective way to do this is to write the words or phrases you want to practice in a list down the left hand side of a lined page. If the writing system uses letters of the alphabet (unlike Chinese), write the first letter of each word after the end of each word. rhythm r agree a common c Fold the paper so you can only see the first letters, and then try to write the words from memory. rhythm rhythm agree agree common common Unfold the paper and check your work. Write the first letter of each word again, fold the paper, and write the words again. Do this until each line is filled. How do you learn pronunciation? Learning to pronounce the language in a clear way is a very important learning goal. Clear pronunciation will help you to be better understood by native speakers, and they will also appreciate your efforts. Like other aspects of language knowledge, it is helped if there is the opportunity to listen to the language (meaning-focused input), to speak (meaning-focused output), to study aspects of pronunciation (language-focused learning), and to get fluent in listening to and speaking about easy familiar topics (fluency development). Young children seem to have little need for language-focused learning to develop their pronunciation of another language, and rely on the three meaning-focused strands. Older learners are much less likely to develop a native-like pronunciation, although some do. Most older learners may need to be satisfied with a comprehensible accented pronunciation, although extra effort can result in improvement. For older learners, the quality of their pronunciation is likely to depend on their opportunities to use the language, and the amount of time and effort they spend on the deliberate study of pronunciation. 34 The deliberate study of pronunciation should involve first of all finding out what the difficult sounds are. This will largely depend on the differences between your first language and the language you are learning. Secondly, the individual sounds that are difficult should be studied and practised in simple syllables. The study of how sounds are made is called articulatory phonetics. For example, for learners of English, the sound at the beginning of the, this, there, and that is often a problem. Knowing whether it is voiced or voiceless, whether it is a stop or fricative, and what parts of the mouth are used to make the sound can help in learning to pronounce the sound. The sound in the is a voiced (using your vocal cords), fricative (using top teeth and tip of the tongue). Once a difficult sound can be made in an isolated syllable, it needs to be practised in the most common words that it appears in, and should be also practised in phrases and short sentences. It is not a good idea to practice such sounds in tongue twisters as these are often too difficult even for native speakers. A well-informed teacher is particularly helpful when learning individual sounds. Practice in words and phrases can be done using a computer-based audio editor which can slow speech down. The freely available program Audacity is a good choice. Also, repeatedly imitating clips from movies can help with pronunciation. It is worth spending time on pronunciation early in the learning of a language because later remedial work on pronunciation requires much more effort. How do you learn grammar (or anything)? A large part of this book focuses on the principle of the four strands. This principle says that in order to have a proper balance of opportunities for learning, we need to spend about one quarter of our time learning through input, about one quarter of our time learning through output, about one quarter of our time doing deliberate learning, and about one quarter of our time working with easy input and output in order to develop fluency. The principle of the four strands is a very powerful principle because it allows us to answer questions like How do we learn grammar?, How do we learn vocabulary?, How do we learn to speak in another language? and so on. Let us look at an example of this by addressing the question How do we learn grammar?. Typically, people think of the learning of grammar as involving learning the names of parts of speech, learning to describe grammatical constructions, and learning how to correct errors. However, these are all ways of doing deliberate learning, and most of the learning of grammar needs to involve using the language. Chapter 5 / 35  We can learn grammar through listening and reading. When we repeatedly meet grammatical constructions in our reading and listening, we learn them without having to give them much, if any, deliberate attention. This is partly because a lot of grammar learning occurs through learning phrases, that is, we learn what words go with other words. The more we read and listen, the more we have a chance to increase our receptive grammatical knowledge. We can also learn grammar through speaking and writing. When we speak and write, we notice gaps in our knowledge, and this noticing increases the chances that we will give attention to these gaps when we listen and read. That is, having to speak and write can improve the chances of learning through listening and reading. We can also learn grammar through speaking and writing by taking chances. That is, we try out phrases and constructions that we are unsure about to see if they work. Often this trying out makes use of patterns from our first language. So this trying out can be a risky business which may result in error, but it is an important way of learning. We can learn grammar deliberately, by studying it and by memorizing useful phrases and sentences but deliberate study of the grammar should make up much less than one quarter of your language learning time. Useful grammar study activities include using substitution tables if they are available, getting feedback on spoken and written production (correcting errors), doing dictation activities, and having small amounts of clear simple explanations of important grammatical features. Just as we can learn grammar through meaning-focused input and meaning-focused output, we can also learn grammar incidentally through fluency development. Fluency development involves working with very easy familiar material with some encouragement to go faster. Fluency development activities can provide large amounts of input and output, and because of this increased exposure to the language, fluency development activities can add to and strengthen grammatical knowledge both receptively and productively. How do you learn vocabulary? The four strands principle applies to the learning of vocabulary in the same way that it applies to the learning of grammar, and to the learning of the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. We need to learn vocabulary through meaning- focused input, through meaning-focused output, through language-focused learning, and through fluency development. Meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, and fluency development activities are all communicative activities where we are 36 involved in understanding and producing messages. The basic requirement of these communicative activities is that we are working at a level of difficulty which is suitable for our present level of proficiency. The deliberate learning of vocabulary involves deliberately studying unknown words (preferably through the use of bilingual word cards), deliberately focusing on vocabulary with the help of a teacher or a dictionary as when doing intensive reading, getting feedback on our spoken and written production, and deliberately learning strategies such as guessing from context, using word cards, analysing words into word parts, and dictionary use. We can apply the four strands in the same way to the learning of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. Because three of the strands involve communicative activities, the major differences between the learning of listening, speaking, reading and writing come from the focus on input (listening and reading) or output (speaking and writing), and particularly on the ways of doing deliberate learning for each of the four language skills. Deliberate learning activities are typically the kinds of activities we think about when we think of how to learn another language. However, deliberate learning is only one strand of a well-balanced course and should take up no more than one-quarter of the total time in a course. In the next chapter we look at the fourth strand of a course–fluency development. Chapter 5 / 37