Okay, mother-tongue English speakers give me "to have" in the progressive pluperfect tense third person plural! Now "to be" in the imperfect subjunctive second person singular!
I have been in numerous Linguistic courses, I have diagramed beaucoup English sentences and I have been learning English for 27 years, yet I have never on any occasion been asked to do the drills mentioned above for English verbs. I have however been drilled similarly in Greek, Hebrew, Spanish and French. Why?
This sort of drilling has been particularly disturbing to me as I learn French. I am convinced that Linguistic analysis is good for exactly that, but not for language learning, not for language acquisition. What I have observed this time around in the language learning process is that when I look at verbs in nice neat paradigms they are completely out of context and therefore their real meaning is lost on me. This is a grave problem if my language learning goal is to be able to have genuine communication with real speakers of my target language. I have also observed that those real speakers, with whom I desire to communicate, don't give any consideration to the linguistic analysis of their utterances because they are engaged in genuine communication. They don't consider whether to employ the conditional or the subjunctive before they form a sentence, they just speak. They don't stop in the middle of sentences to shift through verb charts, they just speak.
So, I began to ask myself, is it possible for me to get to that point of comfort with my target language? If so, how? Wouldn't it make sense that I should go the same route that those real speakers took? And if I were to go a different route, could it possibly hinder me from reaching my goal of genuine communication?
What do you think?
Curious about the verb tenses I mentioned above? I used the progressive pluperfect once in the this post, it is highlighted in bold. I also used the imperfect subjunctive tense once and it is underlined.
Yes, the verb drills are not the best use of time when language learning time could be engaging in genuine communication.
ReplyDeleteI'm still not sure what I think about the idea of verb paradigms inhibiting communicative language learning. I think maybe for some people it would not and the timing of when verb paradigms are used is important, too. I think even Greg Thomson writes grammar notes to himself as reflections on what he is learning. Do you remember how we did grammar noticing in SLA? But the timing of that is after lots of comprehensible input, and only as a reflection on what you are learning, not as the main meat of learning.
I think it would be definitely better to learn the different verbs in a context. As in, have the same sentence, but just change the subject and verb each time. Anyway, I'm pretty much up for anything that saves me from verb lists!
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Good to see you here, Lydia
You, too, Ibukun!
ReplyDeleteEven though you mentioned context, what you described still sounds a bit like a verb drill. But I do like those. There is a time and place for repetitive practice.
As I recall, grammar noticing starts right from the beginning but the notes should be held loosely and assumptions should be revised as understanding matures. Because of my linguistic background, I couldn't help but notice grammar trends from our very first days in France. However, that is observation. And as I think you getting at, Lydia, that is very different than verb drills that are out of context.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I think there definitely is room for repetition and sorting out of conjugation patterns through input flooding exercises (see post on Oct 6, 2010).
Hey, thanks to both of you Lydia and Ibukun for getting these sorts of convos going. I love it!
ReplyDeleteI like the convo, too, but how do I know if someone has posted to the page? Is there something I need to do to be notified when a new comment is up? On Ibukun's posterous blog, I get email notifications when something new or a new comment in the thread has been posted.
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