I have a BA in German and Applied Linguistics, and am studying Second Language Acquisition for my MA (the study of how adults acquire non-native languages).
Adept, January 12, 2014, 11:27:36 am
I'd be interested to hear the most successful methods for teaching languages to people who are out of those early learn-languages-easily years.Isfahan, January 12, 2014, 12:24:48 pm
The short answer to your question is that an effective language teaching program will make heavy use of what is known as communicative practice - types of exercises that mirror real-life communication in one form or another - interspersed with periods of explicit information about how the grammar of a given language functions, feedback on what you're doing right and what you need to change, and the presentation of conversational models, vocabulary, and phrases that are or could potentially be of use or interest to the students. It seems to be a finding in the field of SLA that skills learned in activities that more closely resemble real-life scenarios translate better to real-world use of the language than do skills acquired in grammar drills. Simultaneously, it seems that feedback and knowledge of rules can help one to make stronger gains from this practice than would simply happen 'through osmosis' otherwise.
It is also worth noting that at the end of the day, the most effective form of teaching is the one that best meets your needs as a learner. The above suggestion assumes you just want general communicative competence - however, if you specifically need English so you can meet with business clients and hash out a business agreement, then job-specific training that focuses on situations and communicative contexts that you will run into in a business environment will be more beneficial than general-communication courses. Similarly, the type of language training that certain members of the armed forces will receive is necessarily much more focused on immediate communicative needs, and necessarily must be more focused than general classes to be more efficient (this was particularly the case in WWII, I am told, where the need for lots of people to understand very basic sentences in a variety of languages was the order of the day. Today, the DoD is slanted in the opposite direction - they need extremely talented individuals who can speak some difficult and very obscure languages at an extraordinarily high level of proficiency, for intelligence purposes.)
I kind of went overboard with my response and did a small essay on the reasons
why a mixed communicative-and-rules classroom is more effective than either grammar drill or pure-communicative (no grammar) models. It delves into a bit of cognitive psychology and the nature of knowledge. Looking at what came out, it seemed a bit spammy for this thread, so I decided I should finally step up to the plate and make a Shared Expertise thread. If you want to see a much more elaborate breakdown of what I just said, feel free to check it out. My full, wall-of-text response is on the second post of the thread:
Adept: Second Language Acquisition (Applied Linguistics)