Suggestions for Students: Make Correction Count

Several months ago, I wrote about welcoming helpful correction.  I would like to add some more thoughts to that post in light of the particular problems facing speakers as they advance in a language.

The more time that a person passes in learning a language the more risk there is of developing fossilized speech: making the same grammatical, vocabulary, intonational, and pronunciation mistakes without realizing.  As learning progresses, so must the motivation and dedication to correcting mistakes.

Here are a couple steps I have taken in this direction:

1. A Correction Notebook: I am keeping a notebook dedicated to corrections I get in my writing and speech.  I prefer to write the correct word or phrase and underline the part of the word or phrase that I produced incorrectly.  Then I write a note beside it if necessary to remind me of the nature of the mistake.
Examples:
son édification
la pratique (pas de c)
constamment = répétitive, très fréquente (vocabulaire)
incessamment = sans délai, au plus tôt (vocabulaire)
possessifs (pronunciation "ss" pas "z")

2. During language sessions, I have started asking our consultants to take notes on mistakes that they observe rather than sharing them right away.  This again allows for a log of the mistakes (I then add them to my correction notebook) and for me it makes the corrections more meaningful and memorable since we can analyze them together without interrupting my train of thought during speech.

Suggestions for Students: Learn through Observation

Give yourself lots of opportunity to hear comprehensible input, and to hear the same comprehensible input over and over.  Comprehensible input is any native speech that is within your ZPD.

These times of listening give you an opportunity to observe.  Each time you listen you will find that you notice new grammatical structures, new phrases, etc.  And eventually these observations will make their way into your spontaneous speech.

Some ideas of linguistic items to pay attention to as you listen:

1. Intonation and expressive utterances: at what place within phrases do native speakers take breaths, how do they indicate with intonation that they have finished a thought, what do they do when they are looking for a word, what utterances do they make when they are surprised, awed, disappointed, etc?
2. Prepositional phrases
3. Conjunctions: their placement in phrases
4. Adverbial phrases
5. Pronunciation
6. Question structure
7. Adjectives: which adjectives get linked with which nouns
8. Emotive phrases: what phrases do native speakers use to express that they are happy, sad, frustrated, surprised, etc.?

Suggestions for Students: Know Your Reading Level

Don't get ahead of yourself.  There are many details to take into consideration when determining your reading level.  However, if you are a strong reader in first language, and your new language uses a similar writing system, a good rule of thumb for choosing reading material is that you should be able to determine the definitions of unknown words from context without the use of a dictionary.

This assumes a couple things:

1. When you first begin learning your new language, reading should not be viewed as a resource for learning, although it may be necessary for survival situations.

2. You should know enough of the words in a text, so that you have a strong context from which you can surmise the definitions of any unknown words.


If you want to become a proficient reader in your new language, you should give some thought to the building blocks of literacy, as well as the concept of transfer literacy (the process of transferring literacy skills from one language to another).  I will be addressing these two subjects in the following posts this week.

Suggestions for Students: Keep a Language Learning Journal

Things to track:

• Daily language learning activities
• Language topics covered in class, language sessions, or individual study
• Resources used
• Ideas for future language learning activities
• Self-evalutation notes: areas where you particularly observe a need for improvement or work
• Cultural notes

Any other ideas of things to track?  Let me know!

Suggestions for Students: Repetition, Repetition, RECORD!

I am convinced of a comprehension approach to language learning.  Hearing natural speech over and over and over is the key to building a foundation for strong comprehension and natural production.  One of the best ways to get this necessary repetition as an adult language learner is by RECORDING.

My husband has been doing an amazing job of managing all of the recording during our language classes and sessions with language helpers.  He has several tips about what to record and how to organize the recordings, so I have asked him to share them with you in the next couple posts.

Suggestions for Students: Welcome Helpful Correction

You may have lots of people around you who correct you, or you may not get corrected very often.  Either way, you may be able to improve on welcoming correction.  The goal in welcoming correction is not simply to get a lot of it, but rather, to get helpful correction.  The most helpful correction allows you, as the learner, the opportunity to observe your errors.

Below is a list of some activities that encourage this sort of correction:

1. Make a recording of yourself telling a story, listen to it with a native speaker and have him/her make corrections.  Record those corrections.

2. Read aloud to a native speaker and have him/her correct your pronunciation mistakes.

3.  Have a native speaker ask you questions, record your answers and the corrections from the native speaker.

4. Listen to these correction recordings in order to observe the differences between your speaking and the native speaking.

Suggestions for Students: Be Patient

Language and Culture Learning takes time.  Especially as adults learning these new things, it is easy to become impatient.  So often, we look at kids and think how easily and how well they learn language.  Yet, there are two things we give kids a whole lot of when they are developing their language skills and those are time and patience.

Recently, I have felt particularly impatient in my pursuit to differentiate and produce the proper pronunciation of French vowels.  Then I was reminded that I have only been learning French for 3 months.  This got me thinking: how long does it take for kids to master pronunciation in their native language?  As I researched this question, I discovered some very encouraging information.  I will be sharing more about first language development in children later this week.

Suggestions for Students: Understand the Mechanics of Your Mouth

The mouth is a very complicated and brilliantly designed machine used for many purposes: breathing, chewing, swallowing, coughing, kissing, and communicating, just to name a few.

When the mouth is used to articulate speech several muscles are used at one time and those muscles are trained over 6-8 years to make precise phonetic sounds in a person's first language.  When we learn other languages often times (depending on the language), we must retrain our articulators (see image below) to pronounce new sounds.

via

When I learned Spanish, this was a very mild issue for me being an English speaker.  Spanish only has a couple phonemes that are not in English, and places of articulation change very mildly.  However, now that I am learning French, my mouth is facing a new articulation challenge.  I will touch on this more in the next couple of days as I compare French phonemic vowels to those of other languages.

Suggestions for Students: Don't Guess on Tests

Language tests are meant to evaluate what you have learned, and to determine your gaps.  If you guess on such tests, you risk skewing the evaluation, which in turn could work against your goal of learning the language well.

Suggestions for Students: Don't Jump to Conclusions

Protecting yourself from jumping to conclusions about the meaning of new vocabulary is important because the range of meaning and the appropriate contexts for words in one language will differ from the range of meaning and appropriate contexts for similar words in another language.  See last week's suggestion to avoid translation for more information on this point.

Keeping an open mind about your new vocabulary will help you remain observative of words used in contexts where you wouldn't expect them.

Suggestions for Students: Avoid Translation

Some translation may be necessary for your safety in a new country.  However, if your first language is a major world language, you will probably have people all around you who are eager to translate words you don't know.  But remember: language learning is not synonymous with memorizing a dictionary, so don't rely on translation for learning.

If you take a peak into a bilingual dictionary (see excerpt below), you will quickly notice that there is not a single word for word correlation between languages.  The ranges of meaning are drastically different in different languages and cultures.  Give yourself time to acquire the ranges of meaning for words in your new language.  So, when people are quick to translate words for you the moment you look confused, politely ask them to refrain; and hold their hasty translations lightly.

via: Webster's New World German Dictionary: German/English English/German

Suggestions for Students: Be Curious

"Judge a person by his questions, rather than his answers." - Voltaire

"I have no special talents.  I am only passionately curious."  - Einstein

A good dose of curiosity will protect your mind from jumping to conclusions, resting on previous assumptions, or forming long lasting stereo-types of your new world.

Suggestions for Students: Become Comfortable with Ambiguity

If you are going to learn a language, I can guarantee you that you will need to walk boldly into hundreds of situations in which you will not be 100% sure of what is happening around you.  If you are willing to accept this reality with a child-like attitude this sort of ambiguity can even become fun (most of the time).