Killing pronunciation 13: Mastering mastery learning, teddy bears and other nonsense!

Good news for those who still believe that their students just need lots and lots of exposure to the language in meaningful contexts--and that their brains miraculously keep track of situations filled with incomplete, seemingly random bits of data that eventually result in the emergence in the mind of words and structures--without the requirement to mastery one word at a time or "get" a grammar structure the first time they encounter it. In fact, in many contexts, mastery learning, seen from this perspective, may have just the opposite effect: destruction of the delicate, potentially associative links of words and actions across situations. 

It is analogous to reading an engaging blog post that has all kinds of interesting "facts" or observations but that doesn't appear to make any sense, at least at the moment. Read on, Dear Reader . . . 

Interesting study, "Learning vocabulary and grammar from cross-situational statistics," by Rebuschat, Monaghan, and Schoetensack, in Cognition in the prestigous journal, no less, reported by Neurosciencenews.com. Their conclusion: 

“We have discovered that the chicken-and-egg problem of learning language can be solved just by hearing lots of language and applying some very simple but very powerful learning to this. Our brains are clearly geared up to keep track of these links between words and the world. We know that infants already have the same power to their learning as adults, and we are confident that young children acquire language using the same types of learning as the adults in our study.”'

And what was that type of learning that was evident in the subjects of the study? In essence they "learned" an artificial language created for the experiment (simply) by looking at a picture of action or a scene while listening to it being talked about. Just that. With repeated iterations, the subjects gradually made sense of what they had heard in terms of being able to associate words with images or concepts and being able to identify the basics of the underlying grammar or syntax of the language. 

The researchers "associate" that innate ability with how babies learn language, where to them words like "teddy bear" and all the other meaningless babble around them begin to connect across situations, where the same combinations of sounds keep showing up, etc. The fascinating finding . . . or claim . . . is that the brain has enormous capacity for holding the information inherent in situations somewhat in "limbo" for a time without requiring instant, meaningful connection to what was encountered earlier.--much more so than current language learning theory generally credits it with. 

The key to the study, however, is that the depicted action and associated objects that the subjects were observing, as the babble poured in, was, itself, meaningful in some broad sense, so that the sound complex was associated with the situation, not the abstracted concept or word, per se. The "very powerful learning" being referred to is what they term, "cross-situational statistical learning." What a perfect metaphor. Recall your first statistics course, the flooding of your brain initially with totally disembodied nonsense that only could be applied meaningfully after multiple passes and luck.   

This is (potentially) big, implying as it does more of a theoretical basis for immersion-based language learning and other less deductive practice. For us in pronunciation work, it suggests that more highly intentional focus of learner attention on both sound and context is critical. It is especially common practice to teach pronunciation without regard to the learner encountering the target of instruction in meaningful, memorable context or story. (If you are looking for a way to better anchor pronunciation to context--and the body--we have more good news for you! Check out the recent IATEFL Pronsig haptic pronunciation teaching webinar) 

If that doesn't make sense now . . .  it will later, eh!