Keys to Learning a New Language

    What do you think about this five recommendations to learn a language.  Comment below and we will talk about it in class next Tuesday.  Have a nice week-end.      

  “It’s a myth that intelligent people are better at learning languages,” says Anne Merritt in this article in The Telegraph (summarized in The Language Educator). “Most language learning skills… are in fact habits, which can be formed through a bit of discipline and self-awareness.” She lists five ways language learners can soar:

            • Listen a lot. Find music, podcasts, TV shows, and movies in the target language and “listen, listen, listen as often as possible,” says Merritt.

            • Be curious about the culture. “The culturally curious students will be more receptive to the language and more open to forming relationships with native speakers,” she says.

            • Guess and have fun. Clutching a dictionary and trying to understand every grammar rule won’t work. “Find a song or text in the target language and practice figuring out the gist, even if a few words are unknown,” says Merritt.

            • Use a variety of methods. Don’t get stuck in a learning rut. Practice different skills and see concepts explained in different ways.

            • Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. “The more learners speak, the quicker they improve,” concludes Merritt.

“Five Common Mistakes Language Learners Make” by Anne Merritt in The Telegraph (UK), December 19, 2012, summarized in The Language Educator, February 2013 (Vol. 8, #2, p. 10), www.tinyurl.com/five-mistakes-merritt

A Radically Different Approach to Foreign-Language Instruction

As you already know, there are a lot of different theories about second language acquisition and the teaching-learning processes involved.  By the end of the course you will have your own point of view.  

At the end of this article taken from the Marshall Memo,  please comment. 

            “For too many years, we have maintained a language-learning strategy that simply does not work,” say David Young and J.B. Buxton in this Education Week article. “[We] seek to teach language to 100 percent of the students with a success rate of 1 percent.” Why the dismal results? Because there’s too much emphasis on grammar and translation and not nearly enough on learning to speak the language, say Young and Buxton: “If graduates of our high schools regularly reflected that, after four years of mathematics, they couldn’t solve for an unknown variable, we would be outraged. But we share a laugh when someone says, ‘I took four years of a language, but I can’t really speak it.’”

            Of course there’s more to taking a course in Spanish or French or Mandarin than oral proficiency – there’s cultural awareness and sensitivity, global knowledge, and exposure to a new language. But because the typical instructional platform rarely has enough intensity or time, these courses don’t deliver oral proficiency or cultural knowledge.

So what is to be done? Young and Buxton believe it is possible to have it both ways if we redeploy the existing world-languages teaching positions, curriculum, and support resources to prepare students for the world in which they live – while satisfying  the demands of states, businesses, and parents:

            • Narrow oral proficiency goals to practical, relevant, real-life language skills, teaching a subset of the current curriculum in greater depth.

            • Teach the other material in a way that helps students understand a country’s cultural identity and compare it to other countries.

            • Teach global knowledge by comparing and contrasting countries that speak the target language.

            “To be clear,” say Young and Buxton, “students will not leave these classes with advanced language proficiency. What they will obtain, however, are the language skills needed to travel in countries that speak the language, an understanding of other countries and cultures, and an awareness of the global issues that impact both those countries and our own.”

            What about the 10 percent of students who want a higher level of oral proficiency? Dual-language instruction is best for them, say the authors. These classes make the target language the vehicle of instruction in all subjects, and studies have shown that students master it at a much high level. A 50/50 split of English and the target language is best for ELL students, a 10/90 split is best for native English speakers.

How Bilingualism Can Affect Your Brain Speaking multiple languages may be an advantage in more ways than one: a new study suggests that bilinguals are speedier task-switchers than monolinguals. Task-switching and its real-world applications Task-switching—the ability to mentally “switch gears” and refocus on new goals—is a valuable skill that has numerous practical uses. You use it to shift attention from the wheel to the road while driving, or to switch gears between offense and defense in a team sport. Bilingualism has already been associated with a number of cognitive advantages, and now a 2010 study from Language and Cognition has investigated how bilingualism might enhance crucial task-switching skills in young adults. This Carnegie Mellon University study recruited 88 college students, half of whom were monolingual and half of whom were bilingual. Both groups had about equal SAT scores, suggesting no inherent difference in cognitive ability. Each participant sat in front of a screen with two different kinds of tasks assigned to each of their two hands. As cues appeared onscreen, one hand was responsible for identifying the color of the cue. The other hand was responsible for identifying the shape of the cue. There were two aspects to this task-switching experiment: single-task trials and mixed-task trials. In single-task trials, participants identified either color or shape but never switched between the two tasks. In mixed-trial tasks, participants frequently switched between color and shape identification tasks—a more difficult procedure. Researchers compared single-task and mixed-task reaction times to determine how reaction time and accuracy differed between groups and trial types. Bilinguals were much faster than monolinguals on trials that required task-switching—their reactions were 6 milliseconds quicker on average. Both groups, however, were equally quick to respond on single-task trials, which did not involve switching. Task-switching and executive control This 2010 study contributes to a growing body of evidence suggesting thatbilinguals enjoy enhanced executive control compared to monolinguals. Executive control refers to a combination of cognitive abilities—including task-switching—that help you make decisions, control impulses, and plan thoughtfully. It’s long been thought that constant management and monitoring of two languages improves executive control—a belief that this Carnegie Mellon study supports. What do you think about this?

Spanglish- What do you think about it?

Interesting site to look at:  http://nelson_g.tripod.com/spanglish.html
For Thursday please write a 500 essay on it.