The austerity of Russian learning

[gthomson]

I keep being haunted by one poster's alarm over my emphasizing
learning as important in addition to studying (and the enthusiastic
support she received from two or three other posters). Perhaps in the
context of university modern language department it is reasonable
that language learning should be heavily intellectualized. It is not
right to conclude, however, that that is the only possible way to
approach language learning. Recently my 15 year old son told me with
a tone of alarm that he had heard that there are seven cases in
Kazak. I quickly demonstrated to him that he was already using all
seven of them (including appropriate vowel harmony and consonant
changes) in his own production (and this after less than eighty hours
of language sessions with an untrained native speaker). In fact, most
of us agree that grammar explanations are helpful to adult learners,
but hopefully nobody believes that grammar explanations HAVE TO BE
the starting point. For example, learners can plunge into learning
using Curran's Community Language Learning, and get grammar
explanations as they are struggling to express meanings. For another
example, the reason my son (and wife and I) was already using all
seven cases in production was  because we had done a moderate amount
of VanPatten-style input processing activities where in order to make
the correct physical response it was necessary to attend to the case
form of the noun.  Learners can go straight into such activities with
minimal advanced grammatical explanations. When I watch well-funded
(by Texaco), beautifully produced efforts to teach Kazak on
television, with complete grammatical explanations of matters such as
how to form plurals, it strikes me that it must make the language
sound intimidatingly complex to would-be learners. In fact, people
can very quickly learn to understand and produce the plurals (after
which point the explicit explanation is helpful, and not at all
intimidating). We tackled Russian cases using input processing
techniques as well. With Russian however, my family members (four of
us at the time) needed a lot more experience with the language before
most of us were ready to grapple with the descriptive complexities
(at which point the grammatical description became valuable, and
didn't seem complex to anyone).

This is just to say that to highly intellectualize Russian learning
by providing extensive advance "access to the systems of patterns" is
only one way to go about things, and there need be no alarm at people
who might downplay such "study" in favour of more engaging varieties
of learning activities, as long as those people too do not claim that
their way is the only possible way.

Regards to all,
Greg

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                http://members.home.net/lists/seelangs/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------