Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&_r=0

Interesting article from the NYT. A few years old, but seems to back up spaced repetition for vocab and review as well as studying in multiple places.

The article's summary above shows the difficulty of assessing these things, and presumably is behind the astonishing assertion that studies cannot seem to find commonalities between the most successful teachers who have different teaching styles.

I imagine that few of us sit in front of the computer or at a desk for hours on end with our nose to the grindstone, and indeed as self-learners are forced to space our study and vary environments and study activities by the duties and events of our daily lives. And presumably we have higher motivation than those forced to take a language course. I suspect that self-learners of almost anything who interact with other learners like we do here, are far more conscious of such research and methods than students in formal courses.

The problem is that it is difficult to impossible for us to objectively measure the effectiveness any such methods. Still, if we find methods we like and stick with, then that beats potential optimal methods and combinations of methods.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning expands on the ideas of this article. (At least one of the researchers mentioned is a co-author).

http://www.amazon.com/Make-It-Stick-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013

I think that the student is left brain and other student is rigth brain thing is not true. I think that each person has individual interests, talents and things which the person doesn't like or can't do. Then, some people are more emotional, sensitive, have empathy, than other ones. But I think as well that this can be influenced by chemicals, for example the hormones and the other chemicals like the body ones or meds as well, not only the person's personality.

The visual or auditory learners is not true as well, only little bit. I think that some peopel can listen better, they can hear better and more exactly the tones, intonation, sounds etc etc. Also, some people focus and analyse this more. The other ones analyse and focus more on the pictures, and other things what they can see. But we all want to hear and see. I don't believe that we are visual or auditory but visual AND auditory.

For sure if you feel panic or fear or confusion, then you can't learn, you must feel ok. Many things interact, listening, seeing, feeling, chemicals, hormones etc etc etc etc

Cainntear should appreciate that quote. In fact, I'm very interested in what he thinks about this article in general.
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Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. A paper so great I have committed the title to memory.

The role of cramming in language learning is an interesting one. If you're of the view that you learn only by engaging with the language (comprehensible input theory etc) then cramming can be a way of giving yourself a mental mini-reference book to allow you to engage more fully with the language early on. I think that's a sub-optimal way to do it, but often it's the best option open to us.

I used to make a fool of myself fairly regularly on HTLAL by saying things about Spanish that were just plain wrong. As embarrassing as this was, it was also really fascinating, because these weren't mistakes in my own language. Rules that I had once consciously known were lost to recall, as I didn't need to remember them consciously any more.

The explicit rules aren't actually your target knowledge, after all....

Yup. I think the power of difficulty is often overstated, and it concerned me that the article made a comparison between learning and physical exercise. You need a mixed workout at the gym because muscles get tired otherwise. You need a mixed workout because overdeveloped muscle groups can put strain on underdeveloped ones. There is no good analogy between exercise and learning, but any analogy leads people to transfer the idea of "no pain, no gain" to education.

If something is too hard, you don't understand it, and if you don't understand it, you can't internalise it. There is also a sort of "Goldilocks zone", because if something is too easy, you don't think about it, and it you don't think about it, you can't internalise it.

The benefits of the "testing effect" are well documented, but usually people admit to not being sure how it works -- the author seems a little too quick to assume a particular reason for it here. Actually, another part of the article gives what I think is the most likely source of the effect:

An awful lot of classroom practice is all too predictable, and a test is not so predictable. Classroom practice of the bad kind doesn't rely on recall, but tests almost always do. I've always held that the test effect is so notable because it is often the only recall practice we get.

While the article is not specifically about vocabulary teaching, I think some stuff on Scott Thornbury's site, An A-Z of ELT, may apply as well. He has page for V is Vocabulary teaching and gives the following principles:

• Principle of Cognitive Depth
• Principle of Retrieval
• Principle of Associations
• Principle of Re-contextualization
• Principle of Multiple Encounters

They are probably well-known to many of us as they are based on the work of many of the same researchers we cite, like Nation and Schmitt. But the principle of cognitive depth especially interested me and I believe applies to thinking in a language. That is, mentally manipulating, as opposed to just rehearsing, knowledge we acquire, helps to cement it, and so does using it in varied activities. I guess one of the few postives of the Communicative Approach is that its applications seem to stress multiple activities, although with an emphasis on fun.

The sad thing with the research findings discussed in the article is that I suspect that only the most talented teachers can implement them well. After they have been put through the pedagogy mill and transmitted to the hoards of mediocre teachers, I suspect they will have much of their effectiveness shorn from them.

I find testing and difficulty to be very interesting. I'm a fan of the FSI drills in the Basic French and Spanish courses. When I move a set of drills that was once discouraging to almost easy or even automatic, there's a real sense of satisfaction.

The French course starts out slow, but even at the pre-mid point, it's constantly bringing in grammatical challenges built from previous units. This is not surprising, as it's the nature of language to build. Nonetheless, in finally getting down a set of drills that demanded that I have down so many concepts from early lessons, I'm hoping when I go back and review the more elementary drills, I'll find they are no longer challenging.

It makes me wonder if the slow steady plodding is the real key. It's probably part of it. Reviews are helpful for solidifying automaticity and also that good feeling that comes from noting progress.

This seems to support BigDog's Synergy theory.

Nice post, Luke. It almost makes me think about why people find success with FSI and Assimil when they seem so opposite. Both sort of have you just continuing to plug along. The testing with FSI being right away and the testing with Assimil being delayed until the active wave.

Interesting article, but with a few weak points. On of these is the passage "The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.". No, because if a learning process takes so much sweat that it becomes puzzle solving (or admitting defeat and leaving the task unsolved) then you may become more adept at puzzle solving or defecting, but not at recall of the topic and even less at using the thing you supposedly have learnt. My own preferred formula is that you should manipulate the difficulty of your tasks to the point where you are presented with a doable challenge, not to the point where the challenge breaks your neck.

The topic of learning styles is one where a flock of believers constantly are told that there isn't any evidence for their claims. One problem is that a serious test would include at least two groups of test persons: one which for a prolonged period is taught in accordance with their supposed styles, and another which over the same period is taught according to a system based on principles which they hate and maybe even can't cope with. Would you like to be in the second group? Maybe you can teach people by flogging them and screaming at them, but even if it worked you wouldn't want to be taught like that. Or if you did, then that would be an argument for the existance of sharply differentiated preferred learning styles (why do people voluntarly choose to become navy seals or French foreign legioneers? Baffles my mind!). To me role play would be in the same category as flogging, while wordlists for others would be worse than watching paint dry on a wall. Can you prove that I learn efficiently from roleplay? Maybe, but you won't get the chance. Apart from that I have seen some horrendous examples of bad science in this field - like the researchers that wanted to test the notion of visual learners. And what did they do? Well, they showed pictures with the words to be learnt - that is: their own preselected pictures. Does it help a learner to show a picture of a dog while saying 'dog' ? No, because then the guinea pigs have to remember two things instead of one, or they may even feel the intrusive foreign picture as a nuisance. My own experience is that to be efficient, visual associations have to build on imagery produced by myself and integrated into one entity with the word or part of it. And that makes it quite difficult to test in an objective way.

In contrast, the article is spot on when it recommends spaced repetition and varied study methods.

This has been done -- see the research mentioned in the Psychological Science in the Public Interest literature review linked in the article.
A change in styles in teaching didn't cause any inversion of which students were successful.

...which is a bit of an empty soundbite in the way it is typically used.

There is a general educational principle that only one new thing should be taught at a time, wherever possible, and "i+1" is just another way of pretending that you're talking about something different, new and unique to you.

One of the big problems in language teaching is the failure to recognise what is actually "one thing". In high school French and Italian, the verb endings for the present tense were presented to us as "one thing" rather than 6. The full present conjugation of an irregular verb was "one thing", but again, in reality, it's 6.

I used a Japanese course that presented dore, kore and are together as one thing... but they are three. Or actually 4: do-, ko-, a- and -re. Which proves the point that you don't always have the opportunity to present literally one thing at a time.

But going back to "i+1", it is tied into the idea of comprehensible input, and the weird notion that you learn by understanding things that you don't understand (paraphrasing, obviously).

It isn't language learning specifically, but I learn best in general by making mistakes. At work, I will learn to do a new process multiple times a week. Some just want to tell me the steps and have me write them down and follow the things in order. Others will look over my shoulder and tell me what to do as I click around. For the first, I find that I do the task just fine in the future, but it is mindless. I couldn't tell you how to do it 5 minutes after I did it. On the second, I fare slightly better. But the first time I try to do it by memory and screw up a bunch of things, all the steps I was told make sense in context,and I remember it. I make a lot of mistakes, but only ever once per mistake. I am trying to think of the best way to translate that to language study!