Sunday, September 30, 2012

Debating the Best Way to Learn a Language

Debating the Best Way to Learn a Language Video Clips. Duration : 4.03 Mins.


This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from voaspecialenglish.com | http What is the best way to learn a new language? A small study of foreign language learning in adults compared two methods. One is known as the explicit or classroom method. This is the kind of traditional classroom teaching where students are taught a lot of information about grammar rules. The other method is known as the implicit or immersion method. The idea here is to learn much the way children do when they learn a native language. That is, by being with native speakers and absorbing the language that surrounds them, generally without a lot of explanation. Teachers may combine these two methods into what Professor Michael Ullman calls immersion-style classroom teaching. But is that necessarily a better way to learn a language?Mr. Ullman was the senior investigator for the new study. He is a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington. He says he was surprised to find that combining the two methods might not help the brain in processing the new language. If he had to learn a language, what would he do? One possibility would be to start with classroom and then go to immersion. But he says there is a possibility that classroom could hurt later immersion -- that is one possibility in interpreting the data. The Public Library of Science published the study earlier this year. The twenty-one adults in the experiment learned Brocanto2, a thirteen-word ...

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