Oscar Swan on Immersion teaching of Polish

Wed Aug 6 15:11:50 UTC 2014

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From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of dusty wilmes
Sent: trešdiena, 2014. gada 6. augusts 18:07
To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Oscar Swan on Immersion teaching of Polish

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<mailto: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<mailto: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<tel:212-854-4850>
Fax: 212-854-5009<tel:212-854-5009>
http://www.annafrajlich.com/

On Jul 31, 2014, at 5:35 PM, Anthony Anemone <AnemoneA at NEWSCHOOL.EDU<mailto: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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