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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Motivation (imp.)

Some types of motivation

Intrinsic vs. extrinsic

Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have to do with whether the motivator is more inside you or outside of you (Deci and Ryan, 1985). Intrinsic motivation is about doing something because it makes you feel happy, more whole, or because it fits in some way with something important to who you are. Extrinsic motivation has to do with doing something for such ‘outside’ reasons as money, job requirements, or passing a test. They may overlap.

Instrumental vs. integrative

Within the language learning field, the classic model is the distinction between instrumental and integrative motivation (Gardner and Lambert, 1972). If you are learning a language primarily for a purpose like getting a job or fulfilling an academic requirement you are affected by instrumental motivation. Integrative motivation has to do with wanting to be accepted by another community.

Motivation and choices

Motivation applies not only to why you are learning a language (see chapter 1), but also to why you make the choices you do while learning. Factors that influence that motivation and hence the choices include learning style and personality, anxiety, self-efficacy (discussed below), and personal history, among other things. For example, you might have taken a trip to Thailand recently and now want to learn Thai (personal history, intrinsic), be enrolled in a program in international relations (extrinsic and indirectly intrinsic if you really like the subject), enjoy learning by talking to others rather than in a classroom and thus seek to participate in immersion learning (learning style and personality).

Another place motivation can affect your choices is in the learning strategies you use. Some years ago, one of the authors needed to learn some Arabic for a two-week stay in the Middle East. What she wanted (her motivation) was to build friendships and get her basic needs met. She also wanted a base to keep learning while abroad. Knowing that she had only a few hours to devote to the language before her departure, she decided that what she would need most was a good understanding of foreign guest etiquette and very basic language for exchanging courtesies and getting around town on her own. That’s what she worked on with her teacher. Discussions of culture and etiquette were in English, but she tried to make the most of her minimal Arabic during the rest of the time, with the result that she had a splendid visit, both socially and linguistically. This is an example of how her motivation determined what and how she chose to study.

Maintaining motivation

So what can you do if you are not feeling motivated to learn the language, do your homework, or speak with others in the language? Listed below are some suggestions.

Review your goals.

Have some fun with or through the language.

Manage your feelings.

Interact with other people.

Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition

Review your goals

You can review for yourself why you are learning the language. You may be able to get back to what got you into it in the first place. For example, even though you are meeting a university requirement to take a language, you chose to study Russian because you were thinking you would like to visit the cultural treasures in St. Petersburg and elsewhere in Russia. You had also met some Russians and liked them. Now you are having a hard time with Russian, and you’re losing interest. Once you remind yourself of these reasons, some simple things you can do are to find a book with pictures of the great Russian museums. Go visit your friends if they are nearby. If they are farther away, try a phone call, just to renew your positive feelings and motivate yourself again.

Build in some pleasure

Find something you like related to the language and let it be your focus. For instance, you might get engaged by the culture of the people who speak the language, by the music, or by sports played by members of the culture. Then you can put some energy into learning words related to your topic of interest and into learning how to talk about it in the language. If you enjoy languages for their own sake, you might find that some of the concepts used in the language are interesting (new grammar categories, for example). You might like creating something new with the language such as a story or simple poem. A number of good language learners find fun in playing the kind of game described in the section on anxiety, where you see how much you can do in the language with what you know. A variation on that game is adding the task of seeing how well you can learn new things without having to go back into your native language. You can use any or all of these techniques to activate your interest in your study, and you will surely come up with some of your own. Additionally, you might keep a list of things in your head that you like (music and art, science and history) or are interested in about a culture and try to learn as much as you can about each. When you get demotivated or bored with one topic, move to another; you can come back to the original topic later.

Manage your feelings

Put failures in their place. Mistakes are not statements about you and your overall competence or value. They are only obstacles for you to overcome and from which you can learn.

Instead of avoiding necessary learning situations that make you anxious or using the “sour grapes” strategy (I didn’t really want it anyway), make use of the suggestions made above for managing anxiety. Find things you enjoy doing, or find new ways to achieve the same result. For example, if you don’t like memorizing verb forms, try reading texts in the language that use different tenses and aspects. Notice the verbs and their forms. Blank out the verbs, and then go through and try to fill them in right. This way you get exposure and a way to test yourself without having to use brute memorization, and you get a sense of gradual mastery as well.

One thing that might help is the fact that most native speakers (outside your classroom) are very tolerant of learner error and accent (albeit the French have a reputation, perhaps unfairly ascribed, for intolerance of the latter).

Interact with others

Relationships with other people can make a wonderful motivator. After all, language is communication, and communication is with other people. Sometimes we learn not only for our own purposes but because it will please someone else, such as a parent, teacher, or friend. In fact, one theory says that we often learn at first to please someone else, and then, by some mental magic, that love of the other person becomes love of the subject (Mishne, 1996). (Many good teachers know this, and they use the relationships they build with students to help them learn. You can use it in the reverse direction: you get an additional benefit from your relationships to help you learn.)

Perhaps the best way to build such relationships is to make friends who speak the language. It would be ideal to use the language with them to practice conversation, but even if you cannot for some reason, you will pick up a lot about the language and culture from them, and your friendship with them will support your motivation to keep working on learning their language. A variation on this approach is to work out an exchange with them, where you spend some of the time with their language and some of the time with yours so that you both learn. Sometimes it just helps to talk with a sympathetic person when you’re frustrated or discouraged about the language learning. Teachers and friends are the obvious starting points, but you may have others you find helpful, such as the librarian or a relative. Some universities have language advisory services or language- learning skill centers; they are a good place to talk out what is going on, and they can give you advice tailored to your individual needs. Think about your social circle: perhaps there is someone you never thought of as a source of listening and possibly advice to whom you can turn.

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Test Anxiety

Some of the causes of test anxiety may be:

1. Previous experience with tests: Unpleasant experiences of giving tests may condition your brain into thinking that the next test is also going to be unpleasant.

2. Self-image: some of us consider our self-image to be determined by the letter grade or points we get on a test. We believe that we are bad at something if we receive a bad grade, but this is a destructive way to take tests. Instead, we must think, “I got a bad grade this time, next time I will be better.”

3. Consequences: When something concrete depends on the test, such as pay increases, a future job, or parents’ willingness to continue to pay for coursework, the anxiety is compounded. If you are in this situation, try to keep the consequences out of your mind as much as possible. This is, of course, much easier to say than to do, but there are some techniques in the next section that you can use. Probably the most powerful is to think about something else – such as the content of what you are learning.

4. Fear and frustration: A test is a concentrated medium for kinds of anxiety we described in the previous sections, such as fear of making mistakes, frustration at difficulties communicating, or even the sense of interpersonal failure (if in an oral interview and you feel that you have let down the person you are talking with). In a class setting, the anxieties may be spread out over time and mixed with many successes, but in a test, they are distilled into an hour or two, so it is important for you to find ways to keep them at bay.

5.“Facing the music”: A test can force you to face up to what you do and don’t know. You may have thought you knew all the Chinese characters you needed to read news articles about the weather, but you come across something you never saw before. (This will be easier for inductive learners, who use context to figure out what something means, than for deductive ones, who want to learn in advance and not figure out.) The prospect of failure, however it may be defined by the test-taker, is a heavy threat to emotional well-being. A test is designed and usually evaluated by someone else. That means someone else has the power to decide what you should know, whether it corresponds to your interests and purposes or not.

Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition

Coping with test anxiety

Test anxiety is not easy to manage, but there are some things you can do. Here are some examples with explanations that follow:

Manage your image of yourself: stop dwelling on your anxiety. Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition uch negative thoughts can lead you to set up images of yourself failing, which in turn may create a negative self-fulfilling prophecy (that is, you may make yourself fail). Instead, use positive imaging of yourself. For example, imagine entering and taking the test in a cool, calm, self-confident way. That can help you build self- fulfilling prophecies in a positive direction. There is a good deal of psychological research on managing one’s self-image and one’s mood – mind over matter, so to speak; if you are interested, you might find many more suggestions on how to do this in the work of the neurolinguistic programmers (Dilts, 1979; Bandler, 1985).

Manage your learning before the test: Being prepared for a test may be the best defense against test anxiety. This way, nothing on the test should be a surprise to you. Second, clarify what will be on the test.

Managing yourself before the test (your feelings and your activities): Everyone has different ways to relax. Some people might soak in a hot bath; others might meditate. Another way to relax is to distract yourself with a good book, a game, or other activity that engages your mind and takes it away from the test. Every list of strategies for coping with test anxiety suggests that students get a good night’s sleep the night before. We follow suit because evidence (cite) indicates the importance of enough sleep to physical and mental well-being.

Manage yourself during the tests: While in the test, focus on the task, not on “what-if” thoughts. That is, think about how to do your best on the questions or tasks you have right now.

Manage your relationships with those who evaluate you: Also in interviews, be open about areas you don’t find of interest. For example, if you don’t pay attention to sports, you will have a hard time talking about them in any language, so let the interviewer know this isn’t an area you have much to say about. Depending on the situation, you may be able to suggest another topic.

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Chapter 4

Anxieties

Learning a foreign language anxiety

Many learners feel a special kind of anxiety when they are learning a foreign language. There are several reasons for this, each of which is described below:

the amount to learn; There is a vast body of information to learn. A language takes years to master to near-native ability. There will always be something you do not know. However, if you make a long-term learning plan and start to see how your daily steps add up to larger and larger gains in foreign language proficiency, you will probably reduce that anxiety to a great extent. Sometimes you may find yourself approaching burnout (inability to work or focus). Under these circumstances, the best thing you can do for yourself is often to give yourself a break from study and any further input. Do something completely different for a while. If you forget a little bit, do not worry, you will have many chances to relearn it even more solidly afterward.

the difficulty in communicating at lower levels; Some people can accept this situation as a natural step in the language-learning process. For others, however, just accepting the fact that beginning language learners can appear tongue-tied does not help. In this case, there are ways to handle your awareness of your communication gaps. Simplification. One way is to learn strategies for simplification. Instead of trying to say, “The obfuscation in the writer’s text organization confuses me,” or, in a different register, which you may also not yet possess, “This author’s writing is so messed up that it is impossible to understand it,” you could use a couple of short phrases to make yourself fully understand and get your message fully across: “The author writes poorly, and I cannot understand the text.” Islands. Another way to handle this situation/reality is to work out and learn some more advanced ways of speaking about several of the topics that you know you will be speaking about frequently. These are sometimes called “islands” (see chapter 10), and they can give you moments of fluency at a level higher than your typical proficiency. (Your teacher or any native speaker can help you work these out, but you will have to practice them so that they will be under your full control and available to you when you need them.) Knowing how to simplify and having a set of islands at your beck and call can do much to allay anxiety. Perhaps the most powerful tool at your disposal is to focus on what you can do. For example, you might give yourself a good pat on the back for finding roundabout ways to get your meaning across when you do not have the right words for getting yourself to a popular landmark from a hotel or getting a shopkeeper to sell you what you need.

self-consciousness about mistakes; It is not only common to all learners to make mistakes, it is also necessary, or you are probably playing it too safe. Mistakes can be your friend. This changed attitude will not only help reduce your anxiety, it will encourage you to speak and write more so that, in the long run, you actually will make fewer mistakes, thanks to all the practice.

the foreignness of foreign language. Learn as much as you can about these foreign cultures and foreign customs. The more you know, the less likely you are to make a faux pas – and the less anxious you are likely to feel about doing so. Also, try to think about the unfamiliar customs as adventures, not as threats, and native speakers and teachers as wanting to help you rather than criticize you. Even if you make mistakes in etiquette, most people will know you are foreign, and they will make allowances. They want to have a good relationship with you, just as you do with them. Some learners also report not liking the language they are studying. It might be the combination of sounds that does not sound pleasant to their ear, or perhaps the manner of expressing ideas seems inaccessible or just plain weird. In some cases, learners like the language but not the culture. In both these cases – not liking the language and not liking the culture – you can experience mixed emotions (and mixed motivation) toward your learning tasks, your classmates, your teacher, and native speakers. Being aware of the source of your aversion or irritation can help, as can being clear on why you are taking the language. If your reason is not related to the language per se, such as wanting to spend time with a friend who is in the class, you might consider whether or not being in this particular language course is a good use of your time and whether you could perhaps accomplish your goals in some other way with fewer negative emotions.

Performance anxiety:

Closely related to foreign-language anxiety, and typically a subset of it, is performance anxiety. You may experience performance anxiety when you worry about answering questions, reciting, making presentations, or doing a role play in front of your peers. Some students are concerned that they sound silly. Other students worry that their accent will be strong or that their answers will be wrong. If you belong to either of these groups, you may be suffering from performance anxiety. It might help to understand that many of your peers feel the same way – and for naught because most students are too busy worrying about their own performance to judge the performance of their peers.

Performance anxiety can occur in study abroad and other in-country situations, as well. In a way, it is similar to stage fright when one has to perform a play or a musical score in front of an audience or the blank-brain syndrome that math competitions and spelling bees sometimes bring. For language learners, though, there is an additional element in that performance anxiety can result in the near-total loss of communicative ability – suddenly, you cannot buy the bread you need at the store, and the like. In addition to resulting in the language learner potentially going hungry, that performance failure makes some learners feel like little children, and this feeling may lead them to avoiding performing at all. One of our colleagues tells the following story:

I remember vividly on my first study abroad visit to the USSR how stunning it was for me that a 3-year old child could communicate more effectively in Russian than I, although I had been studying intensively for two years – the child had had more immersion than I had in that time!!!

Performance anxiety is probably best handled through preparedness. One of the reasons that teachers like to do role plays in the classroom is that they prepare students for performing outside the classroom. If performance anxiety strikes in the community, often the tongue will work automatically due to the classroom practice, and you will know that you dealt with the situation at least once already. If you have not had classroom practice, you can create your own practice by rehearsing the anticipated exchanges sufficient times in advance that your brain and tongue will be on automatic, regardless of what is happening with your nerves, when you have to make those exchanges for real. (For many, the situation of using your foreign language in the community is not all that unlike musicians and actors appearing in front of audiences – very few would ever consider doing so without a lot of rehearsals and repetition. For others, it is more like a jazz performance: part of the pleasure is the improvisation.)

To be continued...

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Cognitive styles

Cognitive styles: synoptic vs. ectenic traits

Synopsis: concreteness, induction, field independence, field sensitivity, leveling, globality, randomness, synthesis, analogue, impulsiveness

Ectasis: abstraction, deduction, field dependence, field insensitivity, sharpening, particularity, sequentiality, analysis, digitality, reflectivity

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Learning Strategies

Learning strategies is the term applied to the various behaviors or techniques we use to learn. Some are consciously employed, and others are automatic. As mentioned above, most learning styles are expressed by observable learning strategy behaviors. In a nutshell, learning strategies are:

things we do;

relatively easy to change;

different, depending on our learning styles;

effective or not effective for specific situations; and

frequently under some level of conscious control.

Deep vs surface strategies

Deep strategies make connections among things: unknown to known, among unknowns, new connections among knowns. These activities normally involve an investment of personal energy and attention and thus impose something of an additional cognitive load.

Surface strategies: Surface strategies do not make much of an investment in the material being learned. They are of a “just get it done” nature. Although they tend to be less useful for bringing material into long-term memory, they can be very helpful when there is something that needs to be dealt with in the short term.

Comprehension strategies

To find out meaning of unknown words written or said, you can use strategies like putting things into context and guessing, apply background knowledge of the topic, you could look up the word in the dictionary, or you can break the words apart and analyze the meaning.

Production strategies

1. Describing the things you want to say

2. Substitute other words that will hint what you want to say; example - hat and shoes for head and feet.

Caveats in using a dictionary

1. Dictionaries, especially bilingual ones, can be very misleading. Words, in any language, have more than one meaning, and simply picking a word from a list may lead to the choice of the wrong word.

2. Sometimes reference aids simply will not work because a concept in one language does not exist in another language. Privacy, for example, is very important to people who live in the United States. Even our children ask for their privacy at times. In Russia, however, people would not understand what this is. There is no such thing as privacy, and no desire for it. It is an alien concept.

3. If you have to look up every word you do not know, you are probably working with material that is too difficult. That is, its difficulty level is requiring you to spend more time in preparing to learn by finding meanings than in actually learning. This is an inefficient use of your time. Ideally, you will be working with texts (written and oral) in which you know enough that you can guess at the meanings of the new items. It is best to try to guess at the meaning of the paragraph or passage, then of the sentences before looking up much of anything.

If you are a synoptic learner, you may find that you refer to the dictionary far too infrequently and trust your hypotheses far too often. Especially at lower levels of foreign-language proficiency, you may need a “reality” check of some sort from time to time. If you are an ectenic learner, you may feel a “tug” to use the dictionary for every unknown word. This is a natural feeling but not a helpful one. If you are very uncomfortable with the top-down approach (reading whole texts, getting the gist, and determining meaning of words from the gist), you can attack the task by noting all the new words and making some decisions about the ones that you want to look at first.

Other resources include grammar books, books and lists of verb conjugations, pre-made flash cards, and word lists, as well as the electronic resources available on the Internet. You will probably like some of these better than others; your learning style will probably play a role in these preferences. Like reading a text, you can use these resources in surface or deep ways. Surface strategies would include such things as glancing at the reference and learning by rote. Deep strategies would more likely involve the making of associations between the items or between them and what you already know.

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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My own learning styles

sensory preferences

Visual? Visual learners acquire new vocabulary primarily through sight; they understand grammar better when they can read about it in a book

--> Yes.

Imaginist or verbalist? --> verbalist

Ideas: Reading books

Auditory? Auditory learners acquire new information through sound; they hear grammatical endings, and they associate new words with sounds they already know. Even pitch, tempo, and intonation provide them with clues to the meaning of what they are hearing, and they are very quick to learn to make these differences when they are speaking the foreign language. Oral learners, then, like to talk. Talking and hearing themselves talk is often essential to their ability to comprehend information and store it in memory.

--> Yes but not too much and not always

Ideas: listen to native speakers

Kinesthetic? Kinesthetic learners are in perpetual motion. They use their entire body for learning. In language classes, role plays and total physical response activities (those that require some kind of physical response, such as carrying out commands) help them learn and remember new vocabulary and grammar.

--> No.

Mechanical? Mechanical learners like to write. They also like to draw and doodle. In class, their fingers are rarely idle. They learn by taking notes, writing compositions, and even copying.

--> Yes

Ideas: Writing journals and taking notes

cognitive styles

Field sensitive vs. field insensitive

--> FIELD SENSITIVE 100%

Global vs. Particular

--> particular (plunge into the specifics of the material at hand, focusing on the words, sounds, or grammatical components. If extreme, you may not take the details to a more abstract level where they are instances of generalities (e.g. you may try to learn the conjugation of each new verb you encounter when you could learn just 2–3 different patterns that would account for nearly all the regularly conjugated verbs) or relate them to a larger context (e.g. treating the sentences in a passage as isolated examples without understanding what they contribute to the meaning of the whole text).

Impulsive vs. reflective

--> reflective 50% and impulsive 50% (when I do not have the energy to go deep and think)

Leveler vs. sharpener

--> both (I look for both similarities and differences)

Sharpeners often naturally notice and remember the subtle distinctions of form and meaning that characterize native-like language, especially if they have high language aptitude or previous language-learning experience. Levelers tend to notice the patterns in the language and, thereby, “see” the underlying linguistic system. Both approaches are useful for language learning, and sharpeners can teach levelers some of their strategies and vice versa to good avail.

Sequential vs. random

--> I prefer sequential and sometimes random

Synthesizers vs. analyzers

--> not sure. Maybe more of an analyzer than a synthesizer but I think really, I am both.

personality types

environmental needs.

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sujanalearningalanguage · 6 years

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Chapter 3: Learning Styles and learning strategies

The activities and techniques you use to learn are called learning strategies. These strategies tend to fall into various groups, which are considered to represent a more abstract set of tendencies that we call learning styles.

Learning styles are convenient shortcuts for talking about patterns of what an individual is likely to prefer as a learner. For example, some people like to follow a syllabus or textbook chapter by chapter when they learn. This approach is referred to as sequential style because people with this style like to follow a sequence of predictable or predetermined steps to get where they are going. The contrasting style is called random; people with a random learning style tend to prefer to follow whatever thread of learning seems relevant or interesting at the time.

Learning styles can be categorized into at least four ways: sensory preferences, cognitive styles, personality types (see chapter 4), and environmental needs.

Sensory; Sensory preferences are sometimes called kinds of memory (as in “visual memory”), KAV (referring to the types of sensory preferences: kinesthetic, auditory, or visual), and perceptual styles. They are the physical channels through which students take in and perceive new information: ears, eyes, and touch, and directly relate to the perceiving (or attentional) aspects of cognition. Examples include working on a foreign alphabet by tracing sandpaper letters, using block letters to spell out words, and forming letters with clay. There are also categories for sense of smell and taste, but these are minor styles. We describe the most common ones here.

Visual Learners: Visual learners acquire new vocabulary primarily through sight; they understand grammar better when they can read about it in a book. Leaver (1998) defines two kinds of visual learners: imagists and verbalists. When imagists hear or read something in a foreign language (or in their native language, for that matter), they see a picture of what they have heard or read. In other words, they make an image of it. They understand through that image, and they typically store the information in their memory as an image. The image, then, is more likely to help them recall the words or grammar than is a verbal prompt. Verbalists, on the other hand, see words. If they hear the French word, soleil, for example, they will not necessarily see a picture of the sun; that is what the imagists would do. Rather, the verbalists will see the letters s-o-l-e-i-l in their heads. Verbalists store the letters, and when they have difficulty remembering a word, they can usually remember the initial letter or some of the letters in it.

Auditory: Auditory learners acquire new information through sound; they hear grammatical endings, and they associate new words with sounds they already know. Even pitch, tempo, and intonation provide them with clues to the meaning of what they are hearing, and they are very quick to learn to make these differences when they are speaking the foreign language. Oral learners learn by listening to themselves. Oral learners, then, like to talk. Talking and hearing themselves talk is often essential to their ability to comprehend information and store it in memory. Whereas aural learners need auditory input, oral learners need auditory output, which becomes their input. Simply put, they get to learn by hearing when they hear themselves speak. As classmates, they can be perceived to be interruptive because they talk “all the time.”

Others; Kinesthetic learners are in perpetual motion. They use their entire body for learning. In language classes, role plays and total physical response activities (those that require some kind of physical response, such as carrying out commands) help them learn and remember new vocabulary and grammar. Mechanical learners like to write. They also like to draw and doodle. In class, their fingers are rarely idle. They learn by taking notes, writing compositions, and even copying. Unfortunately, most classrooms are not well set up for the motor learner. Much work is done in the same seat with only occasional breaks. If you are a motor learner, you may need to find ways to move while seated. One way you can do this is by using your hands.

Field independent and field dependent

Field sensitive learners use the full language environment for comprehension and learning.

Field insensitive learners do not focus on the language environment but rather pay attention to a particular language element being studied.

Classrooms tend to be information-poor environments. This can be a problem for field-sensitive learners. If you are a field-sensitive learner, you can take advantage of your learning preference by finding opportunities to overhear the teacher talk to others, listening to native speakers talking on tapes or videos, reading, noticing posters, overhearing the questions and conversations of other students, and the like. All of these opportunities will provide you with the rich source of information, replete with all kinds of additional details and content, i.e. a “field” of information, that you may need for understanding new words and grammatical usages that you have not seen before.

Global–particular scale

Learners who prefer global processing attend to an image as a whole (as opposed to its parts). For them, the most important thing is seeing and understanding the “big picture.” Informally, we often distinguish between people who “see the forest” and those who “see the trees.” Learning styles and learning strategies 75 Global learners are the ones who see the forest and may miss the trees. They process information in a “top down” manner, focusing on overall meaning first and details later – if at all. If they miss enough details, the meaning that they “invent” can stray quite far from reality.

Students who display particular processing are attentive to discrete items and details. They are aware of the various kinds of “trees,” rather than the forest per se. Their processing of information is “bottom up,” seeing the form first and the general meaning second. Sometimes the details become important to them independently of any relationship to larger concepts, creating a different kind of difficulty for them.

If you are a global learner, you are likely to want to start with an overview of the material, and, if very extreme in preference for global processing, feel that the job is done when the main ideas are understood. First, you should always ask for the overview since it will help you understand better. Second, having received the overview, spend some time thinking about the details and how they work together to build the big picture. For example, in writing you may want to re-read your work more than once because global learners often look at their own mistakes and see as they should have been written, not as they have been written. Sometimes, it is even better to do your writing at night and check it over in the morning when it is no longer fresh in your mind.

In contrast, if you are a particular learner, you will probably plunge into the specifics of the material at hand, focusing on the words, sounds, or grammatical components. If extreme, you may not take the details to a more abstract level where they are instances of generalities (e.g. you may try to learn the conjugation of each new verb you encounter when you could learn just 2–3 different patterns that would account for nearly all the regularly conjugated verbs) or relate them to a larger context (e.g. treating the sentences in a passage as isolated examples without understanding what they contribute to the meaning of the whole text). One thing you might like to do is prepare an outline of the content of any passage you are reading; that will force you to put the details into a larger format so that you will begin to see the big picture.

Impulsive vs. reflective

Impulsive learners think and respond nearly simultaneously. They tend to complete their work more quickly but often with less accuracy than reflective learners. They often give facile answers.

Reflective learners think, then respond. They tend to show more involved and deeper levels of thinking. Reflective learners more often than not work accurately, but their slowness sometimes means that work is incomplete.

Leveling vs. sharpening

When learning new information, levelers meld together information that may be distinctly different and come from a number of sources. Therefore, when it comes time to retrieve specifics, the details of the pieces that formed the melded concept are no longer available to the learner (Lowery, 1982). Levelers remove distinctions instinctively; frequently they see only similarities.

Sharpeners look for distinctions among items. Everything that we said about levelers can be reversed for sharpeners. They readily retrieve details because they store them in different “compartments.” They do notice differences, and they write well when the assignment allows them to use their tendency to notice and describe differences.

The leveling–sharpening distinction can be important for learning foreign language to very high levels of proficiency. Both preferences include approaches that are useful for language learning. Sharpeners often naturally notice and remember the subtle distinctions of form and meaning that characterize native-like language, especially if they have high language aptitude or previous language-learning experience. Levelers tend to notice the patterns in the language and, thereby, “see” the underlying linguistic system. Both approaches are useful for language learning, and sharpeners can teach levelers some of their strategies and vice versa to good avail.

Random vs. sequential

If you are a sequential learner, you may be daunted by the mass of input from the World Wide Web; in this case, you might ask the teacher to give you some questions to think about in advance before you go online, so that you can use your sequential style to advantage. On the other hand, unlike random learners, you may be very happy to have a textbook in your hands, especially one that explains everything in a step-by-step manner

Random learners generally prefer to develop their own approach to language learning and organize assignments in their own way, often completing them in no apparent (to the outsider) order. (Likewise, in reading a novel, many random learners report reading the ending first or skipping out in the book. Extreme random learners have sometimes reported even reading the ending of a mystery before reading the story itself.)

Synthetic vs. analyzer

In language classes, if you are a synthesizer, you may well want to use or even play with new words or features of the language as wholes, rather than take them apart. So, faced with a list of new words, make up sentences or stories that go with these words to help remember them. You might also like to make up new endings for stories that you read or rewrite a story from another point of view, using some things you know and other things that you learn new from a text in the foreign language. If you are an analyzer, on the other hand, you will probably want to zero in on what needs to be figured out, so that you can understand it and feel confident that it is “yours” before you try to use it. Some things you can try doing in order to use new words is to apply contrastive analysis (how these words look and act differently from words in English) and word attack (how you can break these words down into meaningful parts).

Synthesizers assemble something new (knowledge, models, stories, ideas, etc.) from known information. They do this by using the given pieces to build new wholes, e.g. making up new words, using typical roots and prefixes or rewriting a paragraph from a different point of view, using the sentences already there as models. Synthesizers typically put together disparate ideas easily and not only make sense out of them but also develop new models with them.

Analyzers disassemble known information into its component parts and are usually aware that the “big picture” is composed of small pieces. They like rules because they can break them down into component parts and use them to explain phenomena. They like word study because they can break the words into etymological pieces: roots, stems, affixes

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Ver-taal...

...is great for cultural immersion (it is like an encyclopaedia) which will help improve your listening skills, increase your vocabulary, your grammar, and your writing and reading skills. Highly recommended as it is also entertaining!!

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Chapter 2: Understanding the role of cognition in the learning process

Cognition, simply put, means thinking, which has many processes. Some examples are noticing, paying attention, making guesses and hypotheses, monitoring what you say, interpreting what you read or hear, and so on.

The amount of information you have does not translate into communication.

Memory

Typically, long-term memory lasts up to three years. An example of long-term memory is the information you learn for a test and forget the next day or the next semester. Long-term memory generally holds information that you need right now and for the next little bit, but unless there is further use and repetition (i.e. further need for use), this information will not stay with you for a lifetime. Information can be lost from long-term memory through trace decay (one loses the thread of the information), stroke, and other things that interfere with retention. (We will discuss some of these kinds of interference later in this chapter.)

What this means for you as a language learner is that you need to use what you have learned and you need to have many opportunities for reading the same kinds of things, hearing them, speaking them, and writing them over a long period of time. You have probably heard some of these sayings:

You can create non-boring opportunities for repetition and prevent language loss through initiating conversations on similar topics with a range of conversationalists. You can also find some topics of interest to you and read as much as you can on those topics, then write a letter to someone about what you have been reading or write a report on it for your class. Consciously making an effort to return to topics you have not concentrated on in a while will help you keep the vocabulary and grammar associated with them fresh in your long-term memory; at some point, they will become part of your permanent memory store.

Forgetting and rewriting information

If some of the information you learn in language class is overwritten by new information (e.g. after you learn the past tense, you find that you have forgotten present-tense forms), there is nothing to be done except to relearn the old information – without blaming yourself for having a bad memory. The memory itself is not at fault here; it is normal for related information to overwrite information that already exists. One way to prevent this from happening to you in language classes is to repeat old information (e.g. continue to use the present tense on a regular basis) while learning new, related information. That way, your brain should perceive both elements as distinct pieces of information and not overwrite one with the other.

Lost data

In any event, lost data must be relearned; it will not show up again in the future on its own. You will lose data from your language banks from time to time; that is to be expected. Just take this situation in stride and relearn the information. Even the best language learners experience this situation from time to time.

If you do not study or use your foreign language for a long period of time, whole chunks of data may seem to be lost. In some cases, they are lost, and they must be relearned, but relearning rarely takes more than a fraction of the time of the original learning. In other cases, the information is not lost at all, but the pathways for retrieving via activated memory may be hard to find because they have not been used recently. Once found, however, more and more intersecting paths will become accessible very quickly. Most language learners who had good proficiency in a language that they have not spoken for a number of years can reclaim that language in pretty short order.

One of the authors of this book had this experience. Having achieved native-like proficiency in French, she did not speak, hear, write, or read a word of French for twenty years. Suddenly, she needed good French proficiency almost immediately. It took only fourteen hours of intensive study with a native speaker to open up almost all the closed pathways – at least, enough of them for her to be able to use French at a professional level. Another had a similar experience: decades after learning French and Spanish in secondary school, she was called on to travel (on separate occasions) to France and Spain. In both cases, she was amazed at how much returned when she spent fewer than ten hours in conversation with a native speaker. She was able to function comfortably in both countries and continue learning.

Overwritten information

Memory researchers have found that human memory has a number of characteristics in common with computers. One characteristic in particular is unfortunate: new information can overwrite (i.e. eliminate) old information. Some well-known studies have been made of people who witnessed accidents or historical events but later changed their testimony without even realizing it. What caused this was the introduction of distorting information, for example, a question such as: what did you see next to the white house? (Only there was no white house.) Later, people remembered a white house that never was there. Human memory is now considered so unreliable and so prone to being overwritten that many states will not allow the testimony of eyewitnesses alone to serve as evidence in court cases (Luus and Wells, 1991).

--Which is why I plan to keep track of all the topics learned in class and hope to review them once in a while to store them in the long-term memory

We would be remiss not to point out a positive aspect of overwriting information. It is fortunate that this phenomenon happens, especially in language learning, because we can continually overwrite previously learned inaccurate or inadequate language on our way to being more precise.

There are a number of strategies that can help the brain function more efficiently. These include directed attention, repetition, association, clustering, keywords, and mnemonic devices, to list just a few.

Directed attention: Using the strategy of directed attention requires

that you decide ahead of time what you want to learn from what you are hearing or reading and to look for that information specifically. It also lets you pass by whatever you do not understand and focus on what you do understand. This is a blessing because if you are reading an article or watching a film in your foreign language, especially when proficiency is not very advanced, there are probably many words and expressions that are simply meaningless to you. Getting “stuck” on each new word is not an efficient use of your time. Nor is using the dictionary to look up everything you do not understand or know.

Practice and rehearsal

Before you go to meet a foreign conversation partner for coffee, think about the things you might talk about – and practice them in advance. You may end up with somewhat different topics, but some things will be similar or even the same, and the conversation will be much easier for you. You will also be improving your memory for these expressions.

Repeat the expression at every opportunity. Make a game of walking to a rhythm and repeating the word or expression – especially if movement helps you learn (see chapter 3 for more information on kinesthetic learning). Come up with a rhyme for it that you then repeat ad nauseam. There is a funny poem about just this approach. A little girl had studied her “tables o’er and o’er and forward and backward, too,” but she “couldn’t remember six times nine and didn’t know what to do.” Her mother tells her to call Mary Ann, her favorite doll, “Fifty-Four” for a while. She does it and learns the answer to 6 × 9 with no trouble – except that when the teacher asks her the answer to six times nine, she unthinkingly responds, “Mary Ann” – obviously, by association.

Association

We have talked much about association earlier. This may be the strongest strategy you have for getting information into memory. It works faster and lasts longer than other strategies. Moreover, other strategies, such as clus- tering, key words, and mnemonics, have aspects of association. So, whenever you want to remember something new, find as many associations for it as you can. Listed below are a few kinds of associations that you might make. You can probably think of dozens more.

Does it look (spelling) like anything you already know?

Can you put a picture with it in order to remember meaning? Does it sound like anything you already know?

Do you already know any parts of the word or expression?

Can you make up a rhyme or ditty that would go with it and use part of that ditty for recall?

Are there any connections with other languages you know, including your native language?

Can you associate it with a person, place, or thing that might assist recall?

Clustering

Let’s now take a verbal example, for which there are many approaches. To remember the word ball, you might cluster it together with words that sound alike: call, fall, mall. You might even make up a ditty that is somewhat mnemonic in nature (see Mnemonic Devices below): “I will call the mall in the fall about a ball.” Similarly, let’s say you want to remember the following ten words: antidote, antecedent, antipathy, anteroom, antenatal, deformation, demobiliza- tion, deflection, and antiphon. You could cluster these into three groups: ante-, anti-, and de-. You could even reinforce the meanings of these words, by seeing which ones can use synonymous suffixes, as in antenatal and prenatal, antecedent and precedent. You could also remove the prefixes, in your attempts at manip- ulation and clustering, to see which words exist without their prefix and which do not. Which ones can use the opposite prefix to change meaning? An exam- ple would be postnatal. Which ones take other prefixes that cause their specific meaning to change, while the basic meaning stays the same? Examples would be immobilization, inflection, and the like. You could go on and on with these kinds of clusters; as you play with the words, you will learn not only these words but also something about how your foreign language constructs words, along with many new related words.

Key words

Key words is a popular device for remembering long speeches (Lorayne and Lucas, 1996). These are words or short phrases that are used to remind the speaker of whole passages of text. The same kinds of things can be used to memorize speeches in a foreign language. Let us say, for example, that you need to talk about your biography frequently. You can memorize the phrases, sentences, and even full paragraphs of information, then recall how to string them together through the use of guiding key words, like “born,” “school,” “work,” “travel.”

Mnemonic devices

We have seen some forms of mnemonic devices already. These are the use of rhyming words or alliterative words (those that start with the same letter) to remember things. If, for example, you want to remember to buy five things at the store: cookies, ham, ice, potatoes, and sugar, you could select the word chips. Each letter in chips stands for one of the items that needs to be purchased.

You can use a similar strategy in learning words. Let us say that you need to remember the words knockout, boxing, score, out. Using the first letters of each of these words, you could use the nonsense word boks to remember these four words. Some learners find mnemonics complicated to use. If that is you, use other

strategies (described here and elsewhere in this book) to help you remember what you need to remember. Many people, however, find mnemonics fun and useful. Try using mnemonics for a while. You may find yourself in the group that really likes using this strategy.

Aspects of cognition: state-dependent learning

The research that has been accomplished on state-dependent learning can be very important information for language learners. What state-dependent learning theory (and research) tells us is that the context in which we learn new information can be important in helping us remember it (or preventing us from remembering it). For example, some students have problems taking tests if they are moved to a new seat. Part of the “state” in which they had learned the tested information was associated with the desk at which they were sitting when they were learning it. Similarly, those who have spent much time in-country will often claim that they speak better language in-country. They may well be right in that perception: part of the state in which they learned a rich and complex set of vocabulary was the in-country environment and the everyday realia. If you understand state-dependent learning, you can use it to advantage by recreating, as much as possible, the state under which you learned the new information originally.

Aspects of cognition: taking advantage of the chemistry of memory

Chemistry really does play an important role in the efficient functioning of activated memory. Putting the situation in simple terms, memory is moved about the brain thanks to glucose. The production and use of glucose (blood sugar) is facilitated by the chemical epinephrine, which is released by potassium, among other things. What does this mean in concrete, useful terms? If you eat a banana, your now-potassium-rich memory might improve. Any food that is rich in potassium (for example, potatoes) is a better choice for breakfast before a test than those foods that give you a quick energy boost (often, the energy disappears before the test is over). If the food you eat is high in sugar, it will temporarily increase your glucose level in an intensive way, insulin will be released to deal with it, and then the blood sugar level will drop – leaving you in a “crash,” just when you need to be at your most alert. It is much better to eat foods that contain the chemicals that facilitate the efficient use of blood sugar, rather than to raise the blood sugar level itself, especially on a roller-coaster basis. In the same way, it is better to eat a complex carbohydrate, such as a bagel, than something that will release sugar immediately into the blood stream, such as chocolate. Also eating excessive amounts of glucose-rich foods in the morning is not an efficient way to handle your memory-related glucose needs; the best way is to eat moderate amounts throughout the day.

One thing that many learners forget is that chemicals – and one’s body – react to the internal environment. Processes slow down when tired. Cramming for an exam might make you feel that you are gaining important last-minute information but all too often that information will not be accessible to you on the day of the test because you are too tired for your brain to process the information efficiently. It is much better to get some good sleep the night before a test, even if you do not feel ready for the test, so that your brain can make efficient use of what you do know. Of course, it goes without saying, that the best way to prepare for a test is to start on the first day of class and learn a little every day! Then, right before the exam, all you have to do is to review.

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Language Aptitude

Defining language aptitude

Language-learning aptitude is often thought of as what is assessed by language aptitude tests (more about these below). For the most part, these tests address such cognitive abilities as making correspondences between sound and symbol, auditory discrimination (between sounds), native-language vocabulary, memorization, and linguistic analysis, especially inferring grammatical patterns from information provided on the test. There is increasing understanding, however, that current forms of tested language aptitude are only part of the picture when predicting learning success in foreign-language learning.

However, there appears to be more to effective language learning than the factors that are tested by aptitude instruments. Some of these non-tested factors are related to personality, learning style, and emotional factors, which are treated in subsequent chapters in this volume. These are not traditionally considered aptitude factors at all, yet they have much to do with language-learning success. Among these, tolerance of ambiguity (especially comforting in situations where you cannot understand everything) is a major element in language learning both inside and outside the classroom. For example, in a situation that demands rapid comprehension and response, even a learner who does very well on an aptitude test might freeze or panic at the first new words, missing everything that is said thereafter. With a greater tolerance of ambiguity, that learner would be more likely to keep listening until more information comes in and permits a good guess at the likely meaning. Similarly, a learner who tolerates ambiguity would be more likely to try out a response even knowing that it might not be exact.

There is consensus among some experts (Ehrman, 1998, Sternberg, 2003, Robinson, 2002) that more investigation is needed of variables representing a broader definition of language aptitude. In addition to tolerance of ambiguity, they could include such factors as previous learning history, motivation, and learning style. They recommend that these be investigated to supplement traditional tests and especially for use in counseling and advising students on how to make the most of their strengths and work around their less strong points as learners.

For the purposes of this book, the most general definition, which takes into account all the current and potential uses of language-learning aptitude, is that it consists of relatively stable factors within an individual that promote successful language learning.

● Language aptitude testing

The best-known test for language aptitude is the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT, Carroll and Sapon, 1959); it is used in universities and in the government for a variety of purposes, including selection for classes. Other aptitude tests that you might encounter include the Defense Language Aptitude Battery (Peterson and Al-Haik, 1976), the VORD (Parry and Child, 1989), the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (Pimsleur, 1966), a language aptitude test prepared some years ago by the Modern Language Association, five language aptitude tests produced by the collaboration of the University of Wales at Swansea and Leonardo da Vinci Programme of the European Commission in Brussels (Meara, Milton, and Lorenzo-Dus, 2000), and the Oxford Language Test, which was prepared by the colleges of Oxford University and is available online at www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Classics/ cucd/test.html. You should be able to find infor- mation about these tests online and/or in your university library.

Aptitude tests provide valuable information about learner ability to cope with language learning, especially in classrooms. Aptitude tests can provide consider- able data about an individual’s learning skills and learning styles. The MLAT, for example, evaluates skills and abilities related to auditory memory, making infer- ences, focusing on what is most important, cognitive restructuring of information, sensitivity to grammatical structure, and effective rote learning. This information has proved very useful in helping learners (Ehrman, 2000).

● Language aptitude and you

In looking at your language-learning ability, think about all of your assets, not just the ones that show up on aptitude and classroom tests. Do you think fast on your feet? Are you good at making others understand what you want to say, even if it is not completely grammatically accurate? Do you listen well? Are you confident in your ability to solve problems, practical as well as academic?

If you have a low tested aptitude and no previous language-learning experience to indicate that the test score is not indicative of your ability, you may need to work closely with your teacher or other guide. Together, you can put your learning into a format that takes advantage of your strengths and compensates for your weaknesses (or builds the lacking skills) – what these are, in particular, will depend on your learning style and your study skills in general. Your teacher should be able to analyze your answers on whatever aptitude test you have taken and determine the areas in which you will need help. Language learning is not an arcane science, but it does take thinking, work, and planning.

The important thing to remember is that a language aptitude score is not an infallible diagnosis of whether or not you can or should learn a foreign language. Look at the skills required to do well on an aptitude test: holding sounds in short-term memory, comparing sounds and letters, understanding how grammar works, understanding how words are formed, and the like. All these things can be learned. Almost invariably, someone who has studied four to five languages does well on aptitude tests. Why? Because they have acquired these skills while learning the various languages. Not having these skills can hold you back, so finding out which of the skills you lack and developing that skill will go a long way not just to increasing your aptitude score but also and more important to improving your classroom and out-of-class performance. Many of the topics in this book are aimed at helping you do just this.

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Review of Chapter 2

Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition

Review

In this chapter, you considered a number of themes. The content of these themes can be summarized as follows:

Cognition: the process of thought

Memory: the storage of information

Language aptitude: the ability to learn a foreign language r Metacognition: thinking about thinking

Cognition

(1) Second language learning can differ from third language learning in that the more languages you study, the more schemata you have to assist your language-learning efforts.

(2) Knowledge is not necessarily fluency; one has to do with how much you know and the other with how quickly you can recall it.

Memory

(1) There are several kinds of memory and ways of classifying memory: r Episodic, procedural, and semantic memory Attention/awareness Short-term, long-term, permanent, and working memory

(2) Forgetting

Forgetting contributes to learning in the long run

Memory can be overwritten.

When memory of previously known information fails, it can be because long-term memory has been overwritten or because activated memory momentarily cannot retrieve the information.

(3) Memory can be assisted in several ways:

Proper nutrition

Proper rest

Repetition

Association

Aptitude

(1) Aptitude is not a single, monolithic construct. (2) Some aptitude-related skills can be learned. (3) It is possible to compensate for weak areas.

Metacognition

(1) Planning (2) Setting Priorities (3) Monitoring (4) Evaluating

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Setting Priorities

Setting priorities is just as important in language learning as it is in many other aspects of your life. Setting priorities will be far more effective if you base your priorities on the results of monitoring and evaluating. If you find, for example, that you are weak in speaking and yet you spend less time on speaking than on the other three skills, you might want to make opportunities to speak a higher priority in your learning plan.

Setting priorities may also lead to redoing your learning plan. This is not bad; this is good. Learning plans should be redrawn periodically. In fact, if you apply the metacognitive strategies described here, you will find that metacognition is the key to independent learning. It is the essence of what is called “self-regulation” in chapter 9. A self-regulating learner plans, monitors, evaluates and replans (setting priorities, in that process). There is a list of specific self-regulating strategies you can use in the section on self-regulation in chapter 9.

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Metacognition and its importance

Metacognition is basically thinking about what you are thinking; being aware of how you are learning and what you are learning. Metacognition is important for long-term planning and being in track of your progress. If you do not know how well you are learning, or where your weaknesses lie, chances are that you will not progress at the maximum level that is possible.

Monitoring

Monitoring your progress can provide tremendous insights into what you can and should do to improve your own success in language acquisition. Done well, it usually provides wonderful insights that you can use in any planning that you undertake. What should you monitor? Everything, including, but not limited to, the following:

Your overall progress

Your specific successes (and any lack of success)

Your learning-strategy use

Your materials

Your use of time

Your feelings

Specific successes

Besides overall progress, it is important to know in what aspects of language learning you are succeeding well and where you are not succeeding as well. Evaluate the success of the language items you are working on. If you are focusing for now on the past tense, evaluate in general terms how fluently and how accurately you are using it. At a higher level, you might assess how well you are using the right register (social style level) for the people you are talking to. An advanced language user should not be using a register implying familiarity with high-status strangers, for instance.

Learning-strategy use

Every so often, you should evaluate the learning strategies you are using. Some of them may be no longer useful because you have learned new ones or because you have reached a level of proficiency where they no longer help and you need to develop new ones. For example, at lower levels, you may need to look up some words in a dictionary or guess their meaning from context. At higher levels, however, you might be able to figure out their meaning based on the meaning of their roots, your knowledge of word formation, and/or comparison with vocabulary that you already know.

Materials

Evaluate the materials you are using. Can you find better ones? Are you playing it too safe and using things that are too easy for you? Or are they too hard, so that you use too much energy for figuring things out or looking information up in the dictionary when, with different materials, you would need less time for these activities and could spend more time on the information itself, remembering the vocabulary, and exploring the grammar through application of what you already know?

Use of time

Take a look at how much time you are spending on your language- learning activities. In fact, you might want to keep a diary for a week in order to track your time use better. Total time is important, of course. If you are spending four hours in order to learn ten words, you may need a different learning strategy. Specific use of time is important, too. Where does the greatest amount of time gets spent? On vocabulary? On grammar? On application? If you are spending more time on knowledge (grammar and vocabulary learning) than on use (application), you might want to reassess and see if you can find more opportunities for application. If all your time is spent on knowledge activities not by choice but by necessity, then your overall progress in learning the language may be affected, and you should examine what is holding you back. Take a look at the four skills, too. Do you spend more time speaking, reading, writing, or listening? Is the relative balance one that works for you? Would a different mix work better for you? Sometimes it is not how much time you spend studying that matters but rather how you spend time studying.

Feelings

Assess your feelings. Are you feeling discouraged? If so, take a look at why and think about how you can get yourself out of the doldrums. Are you feeling pleased and successful? If so, find ways to give yourself more of the same. Rewarding yourself for your successes – even when the successes are small – can be highly motivational.

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