2008年12月29日 星期一

Who I Am...to What I get

In Verdugo and Beltmonte's study, they examine the effects that digital stories may have on the understanding of spoken English by a group of 6-year-old Spanish learners.

Man's language learning begins at listening. It is well-known that listening comprehesion plays a key role in foreign language teaching, especially with young learners (Anderson & Lynch, 1988; Brewster, 1994; Brown, 1986, 1989; Grabielatos, 1995; Philip, 1993; Rost, 1990; Shorocks, 1994). In the study, it does shows that listening would help learners' comprehesion of English in some way. But the experimental learners in the study are 6-year-old childern. And what I'm, firstly, curious about is how about adult?

Nowadays, more and nore adults just start to learn English. In the prospect of science, adult is over the golden age for listening learning. Adult is over the period for language acquisition. If we want to improve adult's comprehension of spoken English, what kind of way is the best or the most effective? And one important thing in adult English learning is "practical". It's because that in the age, the reasons for those who want to improve or learn Englsh are for work or personal competitiveness. To be honest, they don't have much time to, step by step, get a second language. Therefore, on the basis of it, the course for adult must be very different from for child.

And the second one I'm curious aboutis whether the results of the experiments on all children from different peoples are same as the result in this study. Basically, Spanish and English are both belong to Indo-European language. They must be very similar to each other. For gene's reason, the way how a person borne from Spanish use language may be similar to the way how a person borne from English. Therefore, to those who borne from different language family, the result on the experiment may be kind of different.

4 則留言:

yang 提到...

I agree with your point. Different people come from different countries, the result will change because of the personal background.

Jason's 提到...

For me, I started to learn English when I studied in kid garden. I studied in bilingual kid-garden. The foreign teacher always wants us to follow his order. Like the game called "Teacher Said". It's the way to train your listening comprehension. Stimultaneously, He also demanded us to repeat the new word. These ways correspond with the article.

Amanda 提到...

Yes, different language families may result in different outcomes. But actually Spanish and English are not that kind of similar to each other in some aspects like grammar and every language has similar and different parts compared to others.

Derek 提到...

I don't like to be nitpicky but "youzhiyuan" is know as kindergarten, kid garden sounds plain weird. Now thats over with I'll go onto my main point.

I believe that Spanish and English are actually quite similar. Yes they have their differences like the conjugation of verbs i.e. estar -> yo estoy -> tu estas. However the grammatical structure is quite similar. For example the phrase

"¿Donde esta al cine?"
which translates into
"where is the theatre?"

have the same structure and meaning. These two languages are different, yet there exists many similarities between them.