Being snowed in for a week meant watching a lot of TED talks online, and a few that really interested me focus on certain established environments and how they are not very conducive to education, creativity or motivation.

Sir Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity and the need for a “learning revolution” throughout the world:

Language Mastery also brought my attention to the neat RSA animated talks, such as Changing Education Paradigms which goes along with the above TED talk on education systems.

Dan Pink on the science of motivation:

All of the recent talk about failing education systems makes me wonder why more people aren’t advocating for a Results-Only School Environment similar to the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), especially for language education. It doesn’t matter how or where or sometimes even when you do something, all that matters is that you actually do it. It’s the same principle for work or school – as school essentially is work. Why should students be forced to learn something they don’t want to when they know it will not be beneficial to their future career? Or why should they be expected to remain in a certain classroom at a specific time every week? Or spend four years earning a degree when all of the material could be learned in much less time?

Most of the research on how the brain learns, and more importantly remembers, information goes against the established school schedule and curriculum. In addition to studies showing that self-study or mixed mode classes are better for learning, more and more schools should be catering to what educational research encourages in order to help students learn the most and in the most beneficial environment.  I’ve expressed my views on self-study in the past, and I still believe it is the best way of learning for motivated people. The problem is that current education systems in place do not provide this choice to the many motivated students, besides the occasional online courses which are still bound to schedules set by the school.

I learned everything in my Anthropology 101 textbook before the semester even started, and the actual class was nothing more than lectures of the various chapters of the textbook. I did not learn anything extra by going to class, but I still had to waste 3 hours every week for 15 weeks because the professor lowered our grades if we did not attend. It was incredibly frustrating to feel that more value was placed on students occupying seats in a classroom than on learning the material. In addition, I was only taking the class because it was a General Education requirement, and not because I wanted to or because it had any direct relation to my declared majors of French and Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition. An entire year of my four year Bachelor’s degree was nothing more than Gen Ed classes, all of which were similar to the Anthropology class: class time was simply a reiteration of the chapters in the textbook. Perhaps for students who did not actually read the book, the class was helpful, but for those of us who did the readings, it was a waste of time.

Even when I was in high school, I felt that I could learn much better and much more by studying on my own, away from the distraction of American high school life where sports and popularity were more important than academics. I was always tired (starting at 7:45am, seriously?) , hungry (25 minutes for lunch!) and uncomfortable (you try sitting on plastic chairs for 7 hours) which left me in a constant bad mood. I begged my parents for years to let me be home-schooled though I knew it wasn’t possible financially. I skipped a year of French by learning everything in the textbook over the summer because the other students were just holding me back. If I learn much faster than others, why do I still have to be in the same class as them just because we’re the same age? I did graduate at the top of my class with a 4.0 GPA, but I still felt that school was too easy and not enough of a challenge for me. I did not care for football or Prom; I valued education and learning. Unfortunately I wasn’t surrounded by people who believed the same.

Obviously, results-only environments cannot be applied to all forms of education and they do not work for all people, especially for those who have no interest in autonomy and think they need very specific schedules and deadlines to function properly. Nevertheless, I truly believe that simply giving students the choice and flexibility of learning the way that humans are supposed to learn would improve overall results, especially for foreign languages. When people are free to do what they want, when they want and how they want, they are more motivated and more productive – and the end result is what matters most, not how you got there. If you feel that you learn better at midnight instead of 8 am, or while eating instead of just before or after, or on the couch instead of in front of the computer, then by all means do the things that make you the most comfortable. The only question that should matter is: Did you learn something or not?

Never let your schooling interfere with your education. – Mark Twain

Previously I explained how reading subtitles while watching TV shows or movies helps enormously with foreign language comprehension. I wanted to expand on the Listening & Reading method – because it is what I use foremost when studying languages – and list some freely available resources where you can find text and audio in several languages.

When I first started learning languages in the mid 90’s, audio was an expensive component of language resources and even when cassettes or CDs were provided, the recordings were limited to an hour or so of common phrases and simple dialog. It was never enough to progress beyond the beginning stage. Luckily the internet and the ease with which materials can be accessed and downloaded changed all that – especially concerning materials in the public domain.

Below are websites with free and/or public domain audio files and transcripts to download for your personal use. There’s never any reason to spend hundreds of dollars on language courses!

• When learning a new language, I like to start with Book2 because they offer 100 phrases & sound files in over 40 languages. You can choose any combination of languages instead of just using English as the first language. It’s handy for comparing two languages or using one language to help you learn another at the beginning A1/A2 level.
• LangMedia offers many videos of common conversations and situations that you’re likely to encounter, filmed in the country where the language is spoken. A lot of cultural notes and even realia are also provided. About 30 languages are available.
• If you already have a certain text in a foreign language, but you want to hear how it is pronounced, request a recording at Rhinospike. Native speakers will record an mp3 that you can listen to online or download – and usually more than one person will do the recording so you can learn from a variety of accents.
• There are a lot of language podcasts these days, but many do not offer the transcripts for free. The type of speech available can be put into two categories: rehearsed and spontaneous. Sites like Spanish NewsBites, Radio Arlecchino, and Slow German provide recordings of native speakers reading a text with no mistakes because it has been rehearsed, while sites like France Bienvenue and my French Listening Resources provide spontaneous speech with false starts and fillers. I prefer the latter because it’s more representative of what you hear in normal everyday conversations, but spontaneous resources are much harder to find.

• Foreign Service Institute courses can be a bit boring because the vocabulary is aimed at diplomats serving abroad, but nevertheless, they do contain common phrases and useful conversations for everyday use – not to mention hours and hours of audio and materials for languages that have very little resources available. The books can be downloaded in PDF format, but I am still attempting to create HTML and perhaps eventually DOC or EPUB versions for some of the courses. (I just uploaded six more units of Italian FAST this weekend.)
• For a more literary approach, Librivox and many other e-book sites, such as Logos, offer many classic books and children’s books in several languages, with recordings done by volunteers. I tend not to use these books as much as other materials because literature is very different from everyday speech, but they are helpful for pronunciation and vocabulary nonetheless.
• News sites, such as Euronews which is available in nine languages, sometimes do not offer exact transcripts of what is said in each video. This is the same problem with subtitles for a lot of programs or films. The sentences are similar enough so the meaning is generally the same, but it can be really distracting for beginning learners. At an intermediate level, you can start comparing what is said to what is written and learn two ways to say the same thing.

As Randy from Yearlyglot pointed out recently, word pattern recognition is an important concept in language learning and attaining fluency. Word patterns or collocations are simply the way certain words (whether function or content) habitually occur together. These conventional sequences are instantly recognizable to native speakers of a language, but remain difficult for second language learners to acquire and use properly.

It is usually recommend to learn the gender along with the noun or the plural along with the singular or the feminine form of adjectives when studying vocabulary. But we should go a step further and include collocational information (as well as alternate meanings) for every word we learn. Every time you learn a new adjective or verb, make sure to learn if a preposition follows it before a noun and/or a verb. In French we say se marier avec quelqu’un while in Engish we get married to someone, not with someone. Even with closely related languages, such as French and Italian, the prepositions can differ. In French we are intéréssé par quelque chose, in Italian we are interessato a qualcosa and in English we are interested in something. The verbal counterparts of “to be interested in” in French and Italian are s’intéresser à and interessarsi di. Don’t you just love prepositions?

Translating collocations is also problematic even when there are no prepositions involved. In English we say safe and sound whereas in French it’s sain et sauf (healthy and safe).  Students who are unfamiliar with the concept of collocations will most likely attempt to translate literally from their native language, which results in the common mistakes that language teachers hear over and over again. Even after a year of university English, a lot of my students still said I listen music even though to listen to is one of the most basic verbs that is taught in their middle and high school classes. It is certainly not possible that they had never been exposed to this verb before freshman year of college. And yet, they still had not learned to express themselves properly in English by using fixed phrases instead of translating word for word.

Common two-word collocations in English

I remember learning vocabulary from my textbooks in college and being surprised that collocational information was often not included in the glossaries. In my first grammar class, I was confused that Je lui ai dit (I told him/her) was grammatically correct instead of Je l’ai dit because my textbook simply taught that dire meant to say/tell and did not specify that the correct phrase was dire quelque chose à quelqu’un (to say/tell something to someone or to say/tell someone something). I was also confused about seeing demander à and demander de and not understanding why both prepositions were used. Then I learned the expressions demander à faire quelque chose (to ask to do something) and demander à quelqu’un de faire quelque chose (to ask someone to do something) and the little light bulbs in my head went on all over the place. Why couldn’t my textbooks have taught those full expressions immediately instead of just the verbs dire and demander?

If only all uses of prepositions were this easy to learn…

Prepositions are highly idiomatic in all languages and therefore, can be quite unpredictable. Why does French say prêt à faire quelque chose (ready to do something) but content de faire quelque chose (happy to do something)? I suppose it doesn’t really matter why, the point is to simply memorize the collocation instead of the adjective. This also helps with verbs that change their meaning depending on what preposition and/or complement follow them. If you only learn that défendre means to defend, then the expression défendre à quelqu’un de faire quelque chose will make no sense until you learn that it actually means to forbid someone to do something. The same goes for assister – it doesn’t just mean to help. Assister à quelque chose means to attend something (an event, a performance, etc.)

A good dictionary will always include this information for each entry. There are also collocation dictionaries like Robert’s Dictionnaire des Combinaison de Mots that are useful for quick reference. And if you have no other resources, try Google or Google Battle to see which preposition you think should follow a certain word. Not that everything written on the internet is grammatically correct, but it’s at least something!

For other linguistics nerds who are interested in the lexical approach to language learning (i.e. that lexical items, such as collocations, and not simply individual words and definitely not grammar alone, is the basis of language and therefore should play a central role in language teaching and learning), check out books by Michael Lewis, Paul Nation, Alison Wray and Ann M. Peters. Related to collocations is the research done in the field of corpus linguistics and how we use concordance analysis of authentic language to create frequency lists of these lexical units. If you’re confused by this last sentence, read John Sinclair’s Corpus, Concordance, Collocation.  There is a lot of research in this area nowadays, especially with the emergence of CALL (computer-assisted language learning).