(teach) Bedtime stories for teachers: The Adventures of Francois Gouin

[dk-5]

The Adventures of Francois Gouin

As told by H.D.Brown [1]

In his The Art of Learning and Studying Foreign Languages (1880), Francois
Gouin described a painful set of experiences that finally led to his
insights about language teaching. Having decided in his midlife to learn
German, he took up residency in Hamburg for one year. But rather than
attempting to converse with the natives he engaged in a rather bizarre
sequence of attempts to "master" the language. Upon arrival in Hamburg he
felt he should memorize a German grammar book and a table of the 248
irregular German verbs! He did this in a matter of only 10 days and then
hurried to "the academy" (the university) to test his new knowledge.

Upon arrival in Hamburg he felt he should memorize a German grammar book and
a table of the 248 irregular German verbs! He did this in a matter of only
10 days and then hurried to "the academy" (the university) to test his new
knowledge.

"But alas!" he wrote, "I could not understand a single word, not a single
word!" Gouin was undaunted. He returned to the isolation of his room, this
time to memorize the German roots and to rememorize the grammar book and the
irregular verbs. Again he emerged with expectations of success. "But alas!"
- the result was the same as before. In the course of the year in Germany
Gouin memorized books, translated Goethe and Schiller, and even memorized
30,000 words in a German dictionary - all in the isolation of his room, only
to be crushed by his failure to understand German afterwards. Only once did
he try to "make conversation" as a method, but this caused people to laugh
at him and he was too embarrassed to continue that method. At the end of the
year, Gouin, having reduced the classical method to absurdity, was forced to
return home, a failure.

But there is a happy ending. Upon returning home Gouin discovered that his
3-year-old nephew had, during that year, gone through that wonderful stage
of child language acquisition in which he went from saying virtually nothing
at all to become a veritable chatterbox of French. How was it that this
little child succeeded so easily in a task, mastering a first language, that
Gouin, in a second language, had found impossible? The child must hold the
secret to learning a language!

So Gouin spent a great deal of time observing his nephew and other children
and came to the following conclusions: Language learning is primarily a
matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions. Children use language
to represent their conceptions. Language is a means of thinking, of
representing the world to oneself. (These insights, remember, are being
formed by a language teacher over a century ago!)

Dave Kees

Email - DAVEKEES@...
Chat - Skype:DAVEKEES QQ:897869963
Blog - http://DAVEKEES.blogspot.com
Podcast - http://gcast.com/u/DAVEKEES
Videocast - http://Dave-In-America.blogspot.com

INSIGHTS INTO TEFL
Blog - http://INSIGHTS-INTO-TEFL.blogspot.com
Podcast - http://gcast.com/u/INSIGHTS_TEFL

[1] Highly suggested reading: H.D.Brown, Principles of Language Learning and
Teaching, Pearson Hall Regents, 1994, reprinted by Foreign Language Teaching
and Research Press 2002, ISBN 7-5600-2539-0, Rmb 32.90

[JimMahler]

Thanks to Dave Kees for reminding us that the best way to learn a language is to be a small child growing up in-country. Now, if I can just find a way to get my Chinese students over to the US, and find them a time machine....

Jim Mahler

[dk-5]

"Thanks to Dave Kees for reminding us that the best way to learn a language is to be a small child growing up in-country. Now, if I can just find a way to get my Chinese students over to the US, and find them a time machine...."


Of course, we can't take our students to America. So the natural conclusion of what Jim is referring to is the effectiveness of extensive reading or extensive exposure to English through recordings, movies, etc. at a level of comprehensible input. It works. In this way, every English student in the world learns things that were never taught.


Dave Kees

[Nelson Bank]

> if I can just find a way to get my Chinese students over to the US, and find them a time machine>

How about if we mimic the environment that children are in?  If we can go all the way back to the first year of infancy when recognizing sounds is so important, we've come quite a good way to recognizing words.  I don't know if the multiple-minimal-pair technique has been used, where after one single syllable has been used distinguished from another single syllable, a two-syllable 'word' is used distinguished from another two-syllable 'word'.

Nelson Bank

[karenstanleyma-3]

Nelson Bank wrote, relative to having adults acquire language in the same way as children:
>
> How about if we mimic the environment that children are in? 
>

A good bit of research has supported the fact that brain plasticity/flexibility decreases with age.  One important ability that seems to decrease for most (if not all) adults as they grow older is the capacity to memorize new information (see Kees de Bot's work; I can refer in particular to a presentation at AAAL 2009, but I don't know if that has appeared in print yet).

So, if we consider the capacity of our brain to function in certain ways part of our environment, or at least integral to functioning within a particular environment, I doubt that creating the same environment for adults as for children will bring about the same results.

Karen
http://karen.stanley.people.cpcc.edu
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

[fshdt]

> Of course, we can't take our students to America. So the natural conclusion of what Jim is referring to is the effectiveness of extensive reading or extensive exposure to English through recordings, movies, etc. at a level of comprehensible input. It works. In this way, every English student in the world learns things that were never taught.
>
>
> Dave Kees
>
As Karen says, adult and child brains would appear to learn language in different ways. In any case, young children learn most of their language through interaction for the first five years of their life and do not start reading until they have a vocabulary of around 5000 words. This is when extensive reading kicks in as a learning aid but most L2 learners never get this far. If they have more than 5K words they are most likely in tertiary studies and are swamped by intensive reading.

If we want to look at "the natural way", most third world children learn their L1 through interaction with limited access to movies and reading, and learn an L2 in much the same way when they are a little older.

We can get some tips from L1 acquisition but in fact both early L1 learning and school L1 learning are different from L2 acquisition and we are specialists and must go our own way.

Dick Tibbetts

[JimMahler]

Karen wrote:  So, if we consider the capacity of our brain to function in certain ways part of our environment, or at least integral to functioning within a particular environment, I doubt that creating the same environment for adults as for children will bring about the same results.

There are many other differences between adult and child learners. For example: Adults won't tolerate being treated like children for long -- they'll react with boredom and perhaps hostility. Adults won't depend on (or bond with) teachers the way children do. Adults will be immersed in the language learning environment for only a few hours a week (for EFL, or maybe a little more for ESL), not constantly as children are. Children are a "clean slate", but adult learners must be helped to (overwrite?, compartmentalize? choose your own term) their native language.

All in all, the experience of children learning their first language is at best peripherally relevant to adult foreign language learners.

Jim Mahler

[Nelson Bank]

>A good bit of research has supported the fact that brain plasticity/flexibil ity decreases with age>

Some of the cognitive literature, possibly pointing to a connectionist model of brain function, has given me hope that connections in the brain are set by motivational stimuli.  I could bet that a motivated language student could distinguish all the sounds in a particular language given the right guided exercises.  No guidance is necessary to distinguish the gross sounds, especially if they are similar to those in the native language.  Guidance is needed for the sounds that are close enough in the new language that they wouldn't produce a difference in meaning in the native language.

There is a group out of Utah that sends (mostly young Mormons) to different places around the world to teach K-3 kids.  Their methodology is to create different environments (kitchen, classroom . .) with genuine realia that they cart in their suitcases from the U.S.  I've seen the results at my school in Wuhan.  What they are doing with young kids, and without any long-term training(!) is to effectively block out stimuli that do not account for being logically including in the classroom patter as part of a particular set of vocabulary items and sentence constructions.  What you have left is a limited amount of 'high energy' information that is easy to remember because of its uniqueness in the created classroom environment.
Nelson Bank

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