It's rare that I read an article on language acquisition/learning/teaching where I agree with it so completely that I don't think something has been misinterpreted or misrepresented. This short article is one of those occasions.
The "little kids are natural language learners" trope is so immediately accepted that we don't stop to consider that there are different ways of being exposed to or taught a language. Early exposure is great if it's natural and immersive. "Traditional" language classes trying to teach isolated vocabulary aren't going to get very far at that age, and the students don't have the metacognitive maturity to handle grammatical explanations. If the latter is all that's available, then older children will pick up the formal lessons more efficiently than elementary-age. Which isn't to say that early formal lessons are worthless, but their worth might be more in exposure to positive multilingual representations rather than in acquired linguistic competence. The flipside of this, in my opinion (something the article doesn't get into), is that total immersion is primarily appropriate with very young learners, who are more accustomed to and unfazed by incomprehensible input. With the development of cognitive maturity and megacognitive awareness, in older children and adult learners, an insistence on complete immersion with no concrete establishment of meaning or comprehension checking can be intensely stressful. As I discuss in an earlier post, this is another reason I believe in the (minimal but) strategic use of the L1 in the classroom. What works with some age groups and in some contexts doesn't necessarily translate (no pun intended) to other age groups and contexts, so in the same way that a formal language lesson has little place with kindergarteners, it may not be optimal to try to recreate an immersive environment with adults.
0 Comments
|
AuthorThis is a place where I record thoughts on second language research and pedagogical theory Archives
June 2019
Categories |