Oscar Swan on Immersion teaching of Polish

[dusty wilmes]

Hi Tony,


I also enjoyed the Swan article--thank you for sharing it--and think he
raises important caveats to the panacea of immersion (and the communicative
method). I also see how, in my own experience learning Polish, certain
fossilized mistakes developed.


His point about such mistakes, which are reinforced and never corrected
because the communication is understood well enough, is well-taken. I also
thought the analysis of some of the evolved strategies of advanced speakers
was insightful (using chunk phrases, avoiding grammatically complex
constructions, etc).


In our field, I think Swan’s study provides a compelling argument for not
taking the communicative method too far, but applying a hybrid approach
with greater explicit grammar instruction than might be done in, say,
Spanish. On the other hand, since he is analyzing a total immersion
experience, and most students have a meager 5 hours a week of language
classes at best, I can see why we stress communicative method and its focus
on maximizing language input. I would imagine the best balance for our
languages to be a largely communicative approach with regular, brief
insertions of explicit grammar instruction (even a bit of drilling endings,
God forbid), this way we teach the students a  'predisposition to hear
things grammatically.’ It is important that they develop linguistic
awareness and continue to evolve their language and not fossilize mistakes.


Best,


Dusty


On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 10:47 PM, Ellen Elias-Bursac <eliasbursac at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Tony,
> I was taught Croatian with the audio-visual method as they were teaching
> foreign students such I was at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in the
> early 1970s. That meant that I learned whole sentences and phrases without
> always knowing where one word stopped and another started. I reached a
> certain point in my fluency which worked well, much as is described in the
> SEEJ article, and, like AA, I had reasonably good pronunciation and a large
> vocabulary so I got away with all sorts of erroneous usage. It took sitting
> down to write a textbook with an excellent grammarian for me to see how
> much of my language usage wasn't quite there grammatically, especially in
> terms of aspect. On the other hand, those grammatical infelicities
> generally don't prevent people from understanding me. It's an interesting
> issue, how correct we can hope our students to be and how we define
> success. Thank you for raising it!
>
> Ellen Elias-Bursac
> Cambridge, MA
>
>
> On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:11 PM, Anna Frajlich-Zajac <af38 at columbia.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> I drink to that.
>> It is an excellent study indicating that we cannot throw out the grammar
>> with the bath water.
>> I hope my English is not totally fossilized.
>> Anna
>>
>>  Anna Frajlich-Zajac, Ph.D.
>> Senior Lecturer
>> Department of Slavic Languages
>> Columbia  University
>> 704 Hamilton Hall, MC 2840
>> 1130 Amsterdam Avenue
>> New York, NY 10027
>> Tel.  212-854-4850
>> Fax: 212-854-5009
>> http://www.annafrajlich.com/
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jul 31, 2014, at 5:35 PM, Anthony Anemone <AnemoneA at NEWSCHOOL.EDU>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Colleagues! Have others yet read Oscar Swan's article in the most recent
>> SEEJ (58:1, Spring 2014, pp.113-131)?
>>
>> Although I'm not a specialist in second-language acquisition, I have
>> taught the Russian language for well over 20 years at 4 US colleges and
>> universities and his argument makes a lot of sense to me. I'm wondering
>> what the rest of you think about the "immersion" method in teaching
>> grammatically-complex languages like Russian and Polish.
>>
>> Tony
>>
>>
>> Tony Anemone
>> Associate Professor
>> The New School
>> 72 Fifth Ave, 702
>> New York, NY 10011
>>
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-- 
Justin Wilmes
Ph. D. Candidate/Graduate Teaching Associate
Dept. of Slavic and E. European Languages and Literatures
Ohio State University

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