Play Reading and Habit Forming
In the last week or so, life's been pretty busy, so I haven't pushed as far forward with Breton as I would like. But that doesn't mean I've stopped. Rather, I've been re-reading lessons, including some that I did quite some time ago.
Often in book-centered households, the children will insist upon sitting with their book for reading time, even if they cannot read, or cannot read at the level of the book they're looking at. This can be more productive than one would think: It helps form the physical habit of spending time with books. What's most amusing, though, is to listen to the child reading aloud a story so often heard that all the words are known, even if the child has no ability to actually read them. At some level, I imagine, this helps.
Foreign language learners aren't in quite the same boat, but it is likely they'll be spending some time with books they can only read because they've already read them - or, rather, worked through select passages before. This is somewhat like talking to yourself - you're unlikely to learn anything you didn't already know. But in talking to ourselves, we sometimes realize which of the things we already knew was important and that leads to new insights. In the same way, reading what we've already read won't teach us anything new, but it might help us understand something we already knew better.
I'm learning Breton with Assimil, and since I'm at the start of the game I've developed an awareness of how changes occur at the beginnings of words without learning rules expressly. But with re-reading, grooves are nonetheless being laid down. For example, teacher is kelenner. But I will never say "Ma kelenner" for my teacher. I've read "ma c'helenner" enough times that the words flow naturally, even though I don't officially know the rule for the change. Especially for languages that work differently from your own, play-reading with texts you can already understand is a good idea then, that way you're saying what you've already said 100 times when you make your own sentences, not trying to remember tables. And once you've read enough snippets, instead of getting stuck in "Me - Tarzan, you - Jane" language, you'll have some good, fully formed thoughts to use as your language building blocks.
Often in book-centered households, the children will insist upon sitting with their book for reading time, even if they cannot read, or cannot read at the level of the book they're looking at. This can be more productive than one would think: It helps form the physical habit of spending time with books. What's most amusing, though, is to listen to the child reading aloud a story so often heard that all the words are known, even if the child has no ability to actually read them. At some level, I imagine, this helps.
Foreign language learners aren't in quite the same boat, but it is likely they'll be spending some time with books they can only read because they've already read them - or, rather, worked through select passages before. This is somewhat like talking to yourself - you're unlikely to learn anything you didn't already know. But in talking to ourselves, we sometimes realize which of the things we already knew was important and that leads to new insights. In the same way, reading what we've already read won't teach us anything new, but it might help us understand something we already knew better.
I'm learning Breton with Assimil, and since I'm at the start of the game I've developed an awareness of how changes occur at the beginnings of words without learning rules expressly. But with re-reading, grooves are nonetheless being laid down. For example, teacher is kelenner. But I will never say "Ma kelenner" for my teacher. I've read "ma c'helenner" enough times that the words flow naturally, even though I don't officially know the rule for the change. Especially for languages that work differently from your own, play-reading with texts you can already understand is a good idea then, that way you're saying what you've already said 100 times when you make your own sentences, not trying to remember tables. And once you've read enough snippets, instead of getting stuck in "Me - Tarzan, you - Jane" language, you'll have some good, fully formed thoughts to use as your language building blocks.
Labels: learning
1 Comments:
Interesting ideas. I would agree that there is value in reading a text that is "beyond us" even if we're not able to really read every word, or even if we have read the material before. Repetition is a key part of the learning process, and I'm very much of the opinion that immersion does lead to learning more than people tend to think.
Sometimes I find myself thinking back to how I learned to read in the first place, especially learning east asian languages with different alphabets. When I was a child I had to spend several years reading at pedestrian pace, building up from picture books to story books with big text, and only after some considerable graft to "adult" style materials. Much of it was repetition, but it was the most effective way to learn; when you're surrounded by something that alien, learning to recognise a few things by wrote is really the only place to start.
Cheers for the thought provoking post!
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