Skip to main content

Little and often

I have often thought that one thing which holds back successful language acquisition is the nature of modern school timetables. One hour lessons are the common practice in schools these days, with two or three contacts with the teacher in a modern language per week. At my own school we still work on the basis of four or five contacts of 40 minutes per week and I believe our students benefit from it. I had never come across any specific evidence for this, even though it seems pretty much like common sense.

I wonder to what extent this was considered when the government designed the 1 hour three part lesson?

Anyway, someone posted a link to an article called The Psychology of Foreign Language Vocabulary Acquisition, by psychologist Nick Ellis from the University of Bangor written in 1995. Here is the relevant passage:

The spacing effect is one of the most robust phenomena in experimental psychology: for a given amount of study time, spaced presentations yield substantially better learning than do massed presentations. It is better to distribute practice. In many cases two spaced presentations are about twice as effective as two massed presentations, and the difference between them increases as the frequency of repetition increases (Melton, 1970; Underwood, 1970). This effect was apparent in of the earliest of experimental studies of learning and memory performed by Ebbinghaus (1885) who concluded that “with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time”. It was soon being passed on to educators; for example, William James (1901) advised teachers and students that it is better to repeat an association on many different days than again and again on just a few days. Yet despite the power of this effect, it is rarely realised by implementation in educational programmes, whether text- or CAL-based (Dempster, 1988).

Ellis was researching vocabulary retention, but I believe that the same would hold for the acquisition of syntax. To my mind, the best school timetable would allow enough flexibility for some subjects, such as art and science, to have longer sessions, but to allow others, such as maths and languages, to have shorter ones.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g