Faster Foreign Language Learning

November snowfall on Chavchavadzis

(First off, we had a rather unseasonable drop of at least 10 centimeters of snow last night. Pictures included! )

Worst Method Ever?

All right, it may not have been “the worst ever,” but it was pretty bad. Years ago, I did a few days of trial teaching at a private school–let’s call it School X–where the students were so miserable they complained to me, a total stranger, on my first day there. I would have thought I’d misunderstood the school’s teaching method had I not been introduced to the whole thing and heard students complaining about that same method. To this day, I still wonder how this school developed their method, but I thought I’d mention it to help clear up a certain myth.

The basis for School X’s teaching method seemed to be the belief that once you learn something “perfectly,” you’ll never forget it. That would be nice. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

“Learn Once, Remember Forever” Doesn’t Work

Nearly all cohesive language courses provide lessons that build on each other and continually review and reinforce the material learned. If they didn’t, students would quickly forget what they’d recently studied. School X’s method, however, was to focus on one topic at a time, completely “master” it, then move to something completely unconnected and never go back to what the student had recently “mastered.”

For vocabulary, a student at School X might learn a selection of words on a theme like “parts of the body” or “kitchen items,” or something more specific like “‘bring’ versus ‘take’.” For grammar, students studied specific functions like the present perfect or relative clauses. Once they learned the topic, they did no review. This was the tagline of the school’s advertising–no review! “Learn something once and never have to return to it.” Oh my.

Snow on a small palm tree. Yes, it's a live tree!

Even worse, students seemed to get almost no free practice like doing role-plays or writing on a general topic. Free practice naturally involves some review, so that would have helped. But unfortunately, it was all memorizing vocabulary and isolated grammar rules, then doing a few restrictive practice exercises like gap-fills, multiple choice questions, and sentence translations.

When a student could do enough practice exercises correctly, they were said to “know” the topic and they could move on to something else. In reality, they forgot what they learned because they had so little chance to 1) practice and 2) review. Some of the students told me so themselves. One said he was only staying with the school because he’d already paid for a full course. Poor guy.

This “learn once and for all” method might almost be acceptable with vocabulary because theoretically the students could review vocabulary on their own. With grammar, though, it’s utterly illogical. The idea that you can master a whole verb tense or some other bit of grammar in a week just doesn’t work. For instance, when you start out with English, you might learn how to use the past simple in some basic, common cases, but you can’t possibly learn everything there is to know about the past simple all at once while you’re still at beginner level.

Surprise! Review is Important

Learning grammar is more like a series of spirals that a straight line. You return to the essential grammar again and again, learning more about it each time. What’s more, it takes time to really assimilate the rules so you can use them more or less instinctively. That’s why many intermediate-level coursebooks cover the same topics as beginner/elementary-level course books. The higher level coursebook provides review and goes into each grammar function more deeply so you learn more about using it.

Snow on a side street.

It may be tempting to look at a list of grammar functions from your target language and think, for example, “Okay this week I’ll learn the accusative case, then next week I’ll learn the genitive case and I’ll know those.” The problem is if you try to master the accusative case before you learn anything else, you’ll end up trying to memorize a lot of abstract rules that may not really improve your communcation skills. It would be like trying to learn absolutely everything about flour before trying to bake some bread. After a few days, you’ll have lots of useless knowledge about flour…and no bread.

So my point is: practice and review. Instead of trying to memorize word lists and grammar rules, practice really using the words and grammar functions you’re studying. If you’re getting regular, real-life practice such as holding frequent conversations with fluent speakers, writing emails, and reading the daily newspaper, you may not need much other review. If you’re not using the language daily, though, regularly review what you’ve studied and actively look for ways to get more practice (in other word, start reading the daily paper).

Keeping a regular review schedule can help you stay on track. At the end of the week, review everything you studied that week. At the end of the month, review everything you studied that month. Eventually, you’ll reach a point at which you don’t need to review so often, but it’s still useful to practise often if you want to keep your skills sharp.

What about you? Have you had any encounters with strange, ineffective or just plain bad foreign languange teaching methods? If so, share your experience in the comments section below!