Korean Job Discussion Forums

[tomato]

James Asher

Asher calls his brainchild Total Physical Response, or TPR. The process consists of jumping while you say "jump" and running while you say "run."

I don't doubt that Asher's method works for verbs, but I cannot understand how it can apply to other parts of speech.

Sign language for the deaf, on the other hand, offers physical responses for all parts of speech. Moreover, sign language can prove useful in case you meet a deaf person. Consequently, I incorporate English sign language when teaching English and Korean sign language when studying Korean.

[tomato]

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky christens his baby nativist theory. Although he admits that some language learning takes place on a culture-specific surface structure, he also alleges the existence of a deep structure, which remains the same from culture to culture.

A developmental timeline is offered in Chomsky's book. At about 18 months, children speak in one-word utterances, which is called holophrastic speech. At about 2 years, children progress to two-word utterances. Later scholars called this telegraphic speech.

Just how much credit Chomsky deserves for this timeline is a moot point. Chomsky's book came out in 1964. In 1963, however, M. D. S. Braine published a journal article on 2-year-old children's speech, which he called pivot speech. He noted that a 2-year-old vocabulary is divided into two sections:

pivot words, which are few and frequent
open words, which are many and infrequent

Each utterance consists of a pivot word and an open word.

Subsequent research has found Braine's observations to apply to other cultures and other languages. The main difference is that 2-year-olds put the pivot word first in some languages and last in other languages.

I would be interested in studying Korean pivot speech. It might be a refreshing
break from the far more complicated version of Korean. If anyone knows of such a study, please write back.

Now back to Chomsky: After learning a grammatical rule, a child may try to apply that rule where it doesn't really fit. Chomsky calls this overgeneralization. I've seen this happen in my English class. When I emphasize the need for plural s's, the students try adding s's everywhere possible.

This seems to be the best Website on Chomsky and language development:
http://www.ohiou.edu/~linguist/L550ex/lgacqui550.htm

[tomato]

Stephen Krashen

Krashen has several names for his brainchildren. I'm not quite sure where one begins and the other ends, but I'll do my best:

The natural approach allows for an initial delay in the students' participation. He calls this delay the silent period. Krashen prefers the natural approach over the direct method, which involves teacher monologues, error correction, and questions and answers.

There is also the traditional approach, which excludes grammatical rules, which he sees as preferable to the grammar translation approach.

The monitor theory states that the teacher should set up an environment like that of person learning his or her own first language.

The input hypothesis is essentially Vygotsky's theory with new buzz words.
According to this hypothesis, the classroom should be set at i+1, where i is the student's current level and 1 is a comprehensible input, or a digestible morsel which was hitherto unknown by the student.

Krashen sees error correction as overrated. Most Korean English students, on the other hand, are afraid to practice English among themselves when a native speaker is not present to correct them. This is a lamentable waste. To help argue with such students, it would benefit all of us to study this Web page:
http://maxpages.com/thena/Treatment_of_Errors

Regarding grammar instruction, my stand is that it is necessary and beneficial, but taught wrong. In most classrooms, students are given a grammar rule, only a few examples, and only enough time to parrot that rule back on an exam. Once the exam is over, they forget the rule. With results like this, it is no wonder that many people see grammar instruction as useless and pointless.

My suggestion is to collect as many applications of the rule as you can find, and then use that rule over and over and over again. Take an example from the Korean language:

If the stem of a conjugated adjective ends in ��, make the adjective by dropping the �� and adding ��. Memorize that rule along with ten other rules, all of which you are also hurriedly learning, write that rule down on an exam, along with the ten other rules, and you will forget it the next day.

On the other hand, think of persons, places, things, and situations which are difficult (�����), not difficult (����� ����), easy (����), not easy (���� ����), beautiful (�Ƹ��ٿ�), not beautiful (�Ƹ����� ����), near (�����), not near (������ ����), dark (��ο�), not dark (����� ����), lonely (�ܷο�), not lonely (�ܷ��� ����), cute (�Ϳ���), or not cute (�Ϳ��� ����). Now spend a couple of hours constructing sentences using these words. Better yet, get together with a classmate and make up questions and answers using these words. Betcha you will remember this rule for as long as you're in Korea.

For a summary of Krashen's contributions in general, see:
http://www.sdkrashen.com

[tomato]

Grigori Lozanov

This Bulgarian researcher devised a method in which the students learned while music was being played. He called this suggestopedia and suggestology, but the idea has since been called accelerated learning and superlearning. Lozanov used the music of early 18th Century composers, but later research has shown better results with the music of Mozart, a late 18th Century composer. Hence, it has also been called the Mozart effect. It is now being promoted in Korea under the name "������Ʈ ȿ��.��

Of course, the background music might be harmful for some students. A musically trained student, for example, might become engrossed in listening to the music for technical details.

On a newsgroup which has been discussing suggestopedia, one member has tried learning while breathing in tempo with the heartbeat. This member reports impressive results. Could the heartbeat rate be the optimum tempo for this purpose? After all, that is the tempo to which we were all introduced when we were warm and cozy in Mommy's womb. This would be an interesting question for further research.

[tomato]

B. F. Skinner

Skinner may be accredited with the last word in some circles, but not among language educators. In many Websites, each claim by Skinner is immediately followed with Chomsky's rebuttal.

Skinner regarded language learning as imitation. How, then, asks Chomsky, do children construct original sentences? Furthermore, what causes overregularization in children's speech, in which the child applies a grammatical rule even where there is an exception to the rule ("buyed," "maked," "womans," "gooses")?

According to Skinner, punishment and reward play a significant role in language learning. Again, Chomsky disagrees. According to Chomsky, children very seldom receive error correction, and when they do, they ignore it.

However, Skinner made one pronouncement which is allowed to pass: he notes that infants and toddlers respond best to infant-directed speech on the part of their mommies. He called this motherese.

[tomato]

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky

Vygotsky named his brainchild social interactionist theory. He speaks of the actual developmental level (what the child can do alone) as opposed to the zone of proximal development (what a child can do, but only with assistance). If you want the students to learn well, says Vygotsky, spend as much time as possible in the zone of proximal development.

I wonder if we all have a natural attraction to the ZPD. Whenever I see a Korean sign in which I understand all but one of the words, I look up that one word.

In the area of foreign language education, Vygotsky is well recognized as a forerunner to Krashen.

[tomato]

more on Krashen

For a quick review of the literature, you can't beat Foreign Language Educaton the Easy Way by Stephen D. Krashen.

The book is only 55 pages long and takes less than 2 hours to read.

Yet in that short time, I found a great deal which favors my side in most of my disagreements with my director. Most of the data, in fact, is substantiated with research. Here is what I found:

■ that error correction is not beneficial (page 5). On the contrary, students who are less inhibited about speaking in the second language perform better on standardized tests (page 16).

■ that writing activity does not benefit beginning students (page 7).

■ that it is better to allow responses in incomplete sentences (page 11).

■ that it is better not to call on students individually. Rather, it is better to allow what one researcher calls random volunteered responses (page 12).

■ that students benefit from the teacher reading a variety of picture books (page 13).

■ that students can learn at least as much from learning another subject, such as music or arts and crafts, taught in the second language, as they could from the traditional approach. Krashen calls this sheltered subject matter (pages 20-22).

[Delirium's Brother]

Tomato, you rock! Can I be your friend?!

p.s. Vygotsky's arch-enemy was Piaget. The tradition that Vygotsky `founded' is also known as (Soviet) Activity Theory. It is still influential among North American sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, like Marjorie Harness Goodwin.

p.p.s. Also, there is a lot of common ground between Vygotsky and the Bakhtin Cirlce, especially vis a vis ontogenesis. You should read:

[tomato]

That's the first I heard of Vygotsky criticizing Piaget.
In fact, that's the first I heard of anyone criticizing Piaget.
What did they disagree on?

[Delirium's Brother]

Tomato, you still rock!
Maybe `arch-enemy' was too strong. But their whole analyses start from different places, with different conclusions. Vygotsky starts from the social and Piaget starts from the individual vis a vis their analyses of ontogenesis. You should also read Chomsky on Piaget too, then. His critique has a different basis. There are a lot of sociolinguistic critiques of Piaget as well. I think the most interesting critique of Piaget is found in Voloshinov and Bakhtin. Some of it is implicit. Read the Emerson article first, much of what I'm saying is in there.

peace,

p.s. Please don't ask for specific sources just yet (I'm working from memory). I'm trying to pack up my apartment and getting ready to leave for Korea at the moment.

p.p.s. You never answered my first question

[susmin]

You can do much more with TPR besides verbs. The purpose is to use your body in association with language. Anything, you can put a motion to is TPR. I have used it for many things, shapes, numbers, occupations, basic phrases. It is very good for beginners. It just gives them something else to associate with vocabulary.

[some waygug-in]

Any idea where Pimsleur would fit into the above...probably nowhere?
I guess is sort of a combination of audo-lingual and translation approaches.
I've found his approach very useful for teaching myself, but quite useless if not impossible to apply in a classroom setting.
It might be OK for 1 on 1 lessons though.



Who was the guy that coined the "lexical" approach, by the way?

[freewill]

Is this some of the stuff you get from an MA (Applied linguistics/ TESOL,...)?

Let's take your rundown on Skinner, e.g.,:

Skinner regarded language learning as imitation. How, then, asks Chomsky, do children construct original sentences? Furthermore, what causes overregularization in children's speech, in which the child applies a grammatical rule even where there is an exception to the rule ("buyed," "maked," "womans," "gooses")?

According to Skinner, punishment and reward play a significant role in language learning. Again, Chomsky disagrees. According to Chomsky, children very seldom receive error correction, and when they do, they ignore it.


Clearly, you have never seen a book by Skinner.
Skinner said none of these things, or anything like them.

Please read what people actually say before telling others about their work!

[Dan The Chainsawman]

[dogshed]

If I wait for a volunteer nothing happens.