Part 2: What Everyone Should Know about Second Language Acquisition

[@ITzVD]

Fantastic lecture! Good content.

[@jpknijff]

Invaluable lecture. It's so sad (and perhaps ironic) the research findings on SLA have such a hard time being accepted in institutions of learning.

[@slmUSA]

@ 2' My former student had this homework in college. Practice/exercise drills don't cause language acquisition. Consistent and constant exposure to quality input is how language is acquired. Thanks BVP.

[@cylt5113]

I remember the Taro eats apples study.

[@dianedavidson5283]

I don't know that I agree that practice is not input. At least it CAN be input. There seems to me no reason that one can not be hearing and thinking of meaning as one says one's sample sentences. Based on how I learned a second language. :) I am not disagreeing that there must be comprehension, only quibbling about the idea that practice of forms must be dead as a means of instruction. :) (at around 5:08)

[@cylt5113]

I would say that practice is the result of input. Practice is fine as long as it's not overdone. I don't know what methods for language teaching are generally used in the States, though. That would be interesting to find out.

[@StillAliveAndKicking_]

In a sense practice is input by definition. However, perhaps the argument is that repeating the same phrases often reduces the amount of different input and hence the amount of input from which the brain can infer structure. The brain needs variety in order to pick up patterns.

[@dianedavidson5283]

In FACT (gee, I wish I knew more and could ask there, or had the background) [at 15:16] - it sure seems to me that lots of drill practice is an IDEAL way to expose students to the patterns their brains are receptive to knowing. ie, repeating the way the sentence should be formed in a drill shows students the way they should use it. I'm confused why Prof VanPatten (and others) seem to say drills are not useful.

[@cylt5113]

Drills really aren't useful. I've seen the results of courses that focus on drilling. The problem for me is it seems to produce passive learning so that students can parrot phrases they have learned but are less able to independently move to a more comprehensive use of language. Spaced repetition does work quite well though and there are some good examples of courses out there.

[@linetmartes3393]

Diane Davidson check out his article on " Research is in, Drills are out" .

[@patrickbaggett1759]

I thought drills were useful too. However, what convinced me they were not is the same thing that hopefully should convince anyone: empirical data from many studies. You can read a summary of Stephen Krashen's work here: www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf

[@RogerWazup007]

I became fluent in Spanish and benefited from explicit grammar instruction and practice. When learning a language, I can often see a new rule and begin using it correctly almost right away. Learning the basics of different languages might have helped, though. After putting verbs at the end of the sentence and conjugating adjectives in Japanese, not using tenses or plural forms in Mandarin, and using particles in both but articles in neither, I have an awareness of how different languages can be and naturally wonder whether a new language has tenses, where verbs go, which parts of speech are conjugated, and so on. Although I can also analyze samples of a language, make predictions about how it works, test those predictions with more examples, and make my own original sentences using what I know and/or words that I look up. I didn't seriously start learning a second language until 10th grade, though; and what I struggle with most in all languages is vocabulary. Also, interpretive listening is my weakest skill/mode.

[@uchuuseijin]

As Van Patten says in the video, "there's no shortcuts" if you want to know the language you have to read/listen to the language in a real communicative context it's very easy to trick yourself (and students) into thinking that drills work, because they can get students to say the things you explicitly taught them to say, but when they try to move beyond that things almost invariably start to fall apart

[@ronlugbill1400]

Je tange espagnol.