Tearlach61 wrote:Agus sin as coireach gur toil leam a leithid TIP, tha e stèidhte air abairtean an toiseach seach gràmmair an toiseach. Cha cleachd an t-oileanach ach fìor abairtean bho thoiseach. As deidh dhut mòran mòran abairtean Gàidhlig dh' ionnsachadh, faodaidh tu structur chur riutha le gràmmair.
I've two problems with that.
1) I want to express myself.
Fixed phrases become a protocol, not a language, because you cannot be creative, you cannot be individual. Language learning is fraught with questions of identity.
Many people have problems grasping the accent, for example, because they see their accents as being part of their identity. I know a woman who has an completely "foreign" accent in Gaelic, but will protest that it's
her accent, it's a
Glasgow accent and that Glasgow is a
Gaelic town, so no-one can ever tell her that her accent is not Gaelic. This is simply a justification of every language learner's natural feelings -- I was discussing this with a Russian learner recently. He was saying that when he practises, he speaks with a reasonable accent, but when he speaks to people it gets very heavily anglicised. I suggested that it was a matter of identity -- that when practising he wasn't worried about how genuine or sincere he was, but when he was trying to connect to people, he felt "fake" when talking as a real person in someone else's accent. He reckoned I was right. I went through that with Spanish, which is the only language I've really had to try to "live" through.
Now, why all this stuff about accents? If you keep creativity out of the actual language (words, phrases and sentences used) you are challenging their individuality. This might manifest itself in the student using their own accent as a defiant assertion of individuality, or it might cause them to drop out of the course completely.
The question of individuality is even more extreme when you engage in techniques of the Total Physical Response school -- TPR involves telling the student to do something, and them indicating their comprehension by doing it. Basically, the student must obey the teacher at all points.
I learn languages to express myself, to assert my independence and underscore my individuality. I don't know anyone who has the same combination of languages as me, and that becomes part of my identity. If asked to discard my individuality and creativity in a class, I would lose all motivation.
2) I don't beleive in the effectiveness of inductive learning.
They call this kind of thing inductive learning. The idea is that the student internally logically "inducts" structure for a comparison of input.
I have several concerns about induction:
A) Imperfect memory
We've all misquoted someone. We usually do this by imposing our own words on someone else's meaning. IE. we do not remember the exact utterance, rather the meaning.
If we do not store the sentences that we have heard, just the meaning behind them, then we cannot have an internal "corpus" or "database" of examples for comparison, so the induction process surely cannot occur in the first place.
B) Imperfect perception
We mould what we hear to fit what we expect to hear. The easiest example is accents. I do not need to be able to speak in an Australian accent to understand an Australian speaking English. I do not have to be able to recreate Spanish-speakers English errors to understand a Spanish speaker speaking English. My brain instead takes the input and makes the leap of connect what they say and how they say it to what I say and how I say it. It follows that the Gaelic learner's brain will distort input to make it fit some sort of imperfect model, thus leading to the Lewisman I know who uses "'S toil leam" as a verb: "'Stoileami gu mór e." "An toileam thu e?" People say "an toil leat e" and "s toil leam e" to him all the time, but his brain ignores the differences as though it's mere dialectal variation or something, and he will never ever notice this mistake without conscious intervention.
C) Incomplete comprehension
The brain is a very efficient machine -- it filters input and processes only the minimum required to understand. So for example, if you only ever hear the word "ainm" in "Dé an t-ainm a th' ort" and "'S e ... an t-ainm a th' orm" then your brain starts to learn that there are only two import elements in the two sentences: the word "tainm" and "Dé" or "'S e". I've heard many learners when presented with a simple question answering a completely different question -- one of the "classroom favourites" that has two or three words in common with the question asked. When we base our teaching on complete phrases, we present too much seemingly redundant information and the brain will just bin the stuff it doesn't need. If the course presented lots of variations with the same elements, the students would instead learn that complete comprehension is required.
So we know that people
remember things wrong after
hearing things wrong after hearing
only a part of it.
That's three largely independent sources of error which leave the basic for inductive learning looking very shaky indeed, and leads (me, anyway) to the conclusion that:
* to fully hear something we have to know the meaning of each of the elements;
* to correctly hear something we have to know how the elements fit together;
* to correctly recall and reproduce something we must have the ability to independently produce such a sentence ourselves.
Now as you say, grammar instruction can leave you scrabbling around to recall the rules -- I've experienced that too -- but that's bad grammar instruction. I've succeeded to some extent despite bad grammar instruction, but that doesn't make it OK.
What I really don't agree with, though, is people who throw all explicit grammar teaching out the window simply on the grounds that the grammar instruction that they have encountered is bad. Babies and bathwater spring to mind.
Grammar can be taught in an effective manner without books, rules and tables, and if anyone doesn't believe me, they should check out Michel Thomas's French, Spanish, German and/or Italian courses. (The other languages weren't done by him and kind of miss the point.)
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