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Are you a learning vampire?

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

I’m not asking if you suck the blood out of every language tutor you meet, I mean do you study with no reflection?

So far in this series on building learning muscles, we’ve looked at Resilience and Resourcefulness.  In this third article in the series, it’s time to take a good look in the mirror.  Let’s look at Reflection.

Reflection is about watching yourself learn, about taking time to construct a mental mirror and holding it up to your learning strategies, tactics and methods.

We look in the mirror to make ourselves better and if we don’t look, we won’t see what we could improve.  When was the last time you actually took stock of your approach to your language learning?  Is it working?  Have you improved?  Can you measure the improvement?

Why note grab a pen, or open a Word file and answer some of these questions right now:

  • Why are you learning?  Think of three reasons why you want to speak French or German or your language of choice.  Let yourself get excited by them again.
  • List five ways you can remember that were really effective at learning or improving.
  • List five experiences in the past that weren’t so effective.
  • What are your bad learning habits? Are you still doing them?
  • How often do you practice?  Is it enough?  What else could you be doing?  If it feels like a chore, go back to your reasons for learning.  Think how amazing it would be to speak fluently or with more confidence when you travel.
  • Ask yourself honestly: how’s it going?  Are you on target? If not, what can you do right now to get back on track?

Taking time to reflect on your learning is vital if you want to learn effectively.  But don’t just look in the mirror – make sure you act on what you see if it isn’t working.

Gareth

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Secrets to Learning: Building Resourcefulness

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

In my last article I delved into more detail about building the “resilience muscle” from Guy Claxton’s four Rs: Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflection and Reciprocity.  Let’s take a look now at building Resourcefulness and the secrets to learning more effectively.

Resourcefulness is about bringing all your resources to bear on your learning.  Though it can be, this is not so much about external resources, but internal ones.

Unless you were incredibly lucky at school, you probably developed lots of poor learning habits.  We get into the habit of being spoon-fed information, but students who want to be spoon fed all the time are rarely able to make much use of what they learn.  Much more important is having an approach to learning that engages all of one’s resources.

Practising being resourceful is:

Questioning: Asking why? How come?  Don’t just accept information but delve deeper into why things are so.  The more time you spend with a fact, the more detail around it that you explore, the more likely it is you will understand and retain information.

Keep an Open-Mind: Your desire to box information using your existing models can inhibit learning.  Allow yourself to be open to things working in ways you don’t yet understand.  If it doesn’t make sense or fit, watch out that you don’t simply reject it.

Be playful: Have fun with your learning!  Try out new ideas, be a little crazy.  All young mammals, including humans, play instinctively.  Play IS learning.  Play IS practice for life.  Don’t just allow yourself to play a little, play all the time! (Why not practise your vocab with Match Mania?)

Be imaginative: you can use your imagination to think up new ways to approach problems, but also new ways to use things you’ve learned.  For example, what could you do to embed our Word of the Day sentences in you mind using more of you imagination?  Get creative, don’t just accept them the way they’re sent to you!

Integrate your knowledge: your memory is associative.  Find links between things you are learning.  Try taking notes in mind map form rather than linear form.  Use colours.  What does a word remind you of?  What other verbs relate to this one and how are they used? I highly recommend reading Tony Buzan’s books on Mind Mapping and Memory.

Use your whole body: Of course you need to use your mouth to speak; you won’t get far just reading and listening – but also try involving more of your body.  Michel Thomas has a wonderfully physical way of teaching students about Spanish accents and stress by telling them to think of ‘pushing down’ to emphasise the syllable.  Language has a physical aspect and it’s more than just making sounds with your mouth.

Let your subconscious work for you: language acquisition is a human instinct.  It reduces with age but the machinery is still there.  Listen to plays, radio stations, audio books, whatever you can whenever you can.  You don’t need to understand it all.  Remember what we said about Fog?  Expect fog.  Let the language soak in.  Play tapes before bed and let the sounds enter your dreams.

What other resources can you bring to bear on your language learning?

Gareth

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Building your resilience muscle

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

In my last article, Four muscles you never knew you had,  I explored Guy Claxton’s distinction between learning skills and learning dispositions.  Positive learning dispositions can be cultivated, built up like muscles, enabling you to learn faster and more effectively. If you recall, Professor Claxton’s learning muscles are the four Rs: Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflection and Reciprocity.

If you’ve ever found learning slow and frustrating and wanted to give up, or just found you start things but somehow drift off, life gets in the way and never finish them then it’s your resilience that’s being challenged.  The good news is, you can build up your learning resilience, but just like training for a marathon, don’t expect that you can go magically overnight from couch potato to running 26 mental miles in under two hours.  Resilience is something you’ll build up gradually with practice.  But what exactly is language learning resilience?

Let me ask you some questions with respect to you as a language student:

  • How often do you break your word to yourself, especially around study?
  • How prepared and willing are you to look stupid?
  • Do you tend to give up or switch off when things are foggy or unclear?
  • How determined and persistent are you when it doesn’t go well?
  • How curious and adventurous are you in learning?  Do you learning actively or passively?
  • How flexible are you?  Do you try other ways when one way fails?
  • How focussed are you?  How easily distracted?

If you realise answering these questions that your resilience actually isn’t all that great you may find it a little depressing.  Don’t!  In fact, notice that’s actually low resilience talking.  Remember you can build up your learning resilience but you will need to start with baby steps.  Here are some ideas for improving your resilience. Why not pick one or two and commit to doing them.

  • Keeping your word to yourself is as important if not more than keeping it to others.  Practise keeping your promises to yourself about little things, like homework or practice.  If you only set aside ten minutes a day or an hour a week to improve any one thing and kept your promise, just think how much you’d achieve? (be realistic though – commit to what you know you can do).  Put it in your diary so you don’t forget.  Tell someone else what you’ve promised to do and ask for help in sticking to it.
  • Practise looking stupid and give up the need to look good in front of others all the time.  Learning requires you to make mistakes, to stand up and get it wrong, or to sound silly doing the accent.  In the long run, the ones who are prepared to look silly at the beginning are the ones who look great later when they can speak fluently.  Which of those would you rather be?
  • Language is messy.  Words simply don’t have direct one-to-one translations and sometimes there’s just no exact word or sentence in a translation.  Give up your need for clarity all the time.  Practise keeping going through the fog and eventually it’ll clear.  Expect fog, it’s normal.
  • Try “disowning” thoughts and feelings that pop up and stop you.  Just because your brain says “give up” or “I can’t be bothered” or “I’m tired” doesn’t mean you have to own that thought and run with it.  After all, your brain thinks up all sorts of rubbish all the time and you don’t say it all.  You have an internal censor.  What happens if you tell yourself that maybe that thought isn’t one you want to take on?  Practise censorship.  Now can you keep going?
  • Practise learning actively not passively.  Bring yourself to learning, don’t think it must come to you or be spoon-fed.  Practise taking control of it.
  • If you’ve tried a learning method and it didn’t work for you, what else might you try?
  • Finally focus.  This one is a killer for me.  I’m like a magpie, distracted by any shiny new thing and for me the internet and email are evil twins.  If you can’t focus because of distractions try moving where there are fewer distractions for an hour or two.  The library.  A café without internet access.  If it’s sunny, maybe go outside and practice in a park?

Two more things to remember: Firstly, your learning resilience is often a function of the subject matter – you may be super resilient at Piano for example, but poor at German. However, you can always build up, and learning is way more fun when your resilience is high.  Secondly, just like muscle strength your resilience can go down as well as up if you don’t keep the truck rolling!  If you’re struggling to even start, here are five ways to get motivated.

What other ways can you think of to help build resilience?  Why not share them with us.

Gareth

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Four muscles you never knew you had…

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

When people begin to learn a language, they usually think it’s a case of learning new skills (sounds, vocab, grammar etc.) one by one until they’ve mastered them all.  However, there’s another vital and often neglected side to learning: the importance of building your capacity to learn.

To use a sports metaphor, someone who wants to become a football player doesn’t just spend their time practising football skills; they also go to the gym to build their muscles and do cardiovascular training so that they can exercise those ball skills more powerfully on the pitch.  The same principles apply to learning any skill in fact.  Of course, for sport it’s easy to see which muscles you need to develop, but what about intellectual skills like learning a foreign language?

Fortunately Professor Guy Claxton of Bristol university and the author of ‘Building Learning Power’ helps out here by distinguishing four ‘learning muscles’. These are not fixed abilities we’re born with but positive learning dispositions and they can be trained just like muscles.  His ideas have been so successful they are now being implemented in British schools nationwide and Building Learning Power has mushroomed into an international brand.  They’re just as relevant to adult learners as they are to children.

In this article, I’ll briefly introduce the four muscles, and in a series of follow up articles I’ll go into more detail about them, and more importantly, give you some ideas about how to exercise them to supercharge your learning power.  You can think of them as the four Rs: Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflection and Reciprocity.

Resilience

Professor Claxton defines resilience as having a curious and adventurous approach to learning, but importantly it’s also the ability to stick with learning when the going gets tough.  People stop for many reasons, but some find themselves stopped when learning is not clear-cut and concepts are foggy.  Students who can tolerate this fogginess and keep going consistently out-perform those who don’t.  How easily do you get stopped and what stops you from sticking with it?

Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is bringing all your resources to bear in your learning.  It’s about being questioning, open-minded, playful and imaginative.  Learners show dramatically increased memory retention when they make links and associations as they learn, and being imaginative and engaging actively with your learning is key here.

Reflection

If you’ve read this far, then you’re already being reflective.  You’re curious not just about what you’re learning, but how you’re learning.  Lifting a mirror up to your learning habits and evaluating your learning process and progress can reap enormous benefits. What’s your strategy and how can you improve it?

Reciprocity

We learn from and often with people.  Humans are fundamentally social animals and indeed our learning instincts have a social basis. Claxton’s last learning muscle is concerned with this social element of learning.  It looks at collaborative learning disposition versus working alone, being open to feedback, attentive and empathic.  Importantly he also includes ‘imitative’ here.  Good learners are able and willing to mimic others – something babies and children do instinctively.

If you’ve found this useful you might want to reflect on the four Rs a little more, list your strengths and weaknesses with respect to them and maybe give yourself a score out of ten.  Next time, we’ll delve into them in more detail and explore some ways you can start to build your learning power.

Gareth

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Top 10 words and phrases – the follow up… Not all words are created equal.

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Last week I posted on the top 10 words and phrases to master when learning any language.  It elicited some great responses from people some surprised I hadn’t include one word or another, others suggesting new categories of words.  The title of the post was of course tongue-in-cheek – the real point was to encourage people to think about the relative importance of different words and phrases they are studying.

When learning a language not all words and phrases are created equal.  Not only can focussing on the “right” words/phrases lead to accelerated improvement in your communication skills, conversely a trying to master too much vocabulary too early can actually be counterproductive.

I will explain this in a moment but just to add a little bit of credence to this post let’s take the Top 10 idea and turn it into a more meaningful illustration. Tony Buzan– the inventor of “mind maps” and all around memory guru explored the importance of specific words in came up with a list of 100 key words in his book ‘Use Your Memory’.

Based on his analysis the words or their equivalents in foreign languages (shown at end of post) comprise around 50% of all the words used in normal conversations. Whether it is 50% or not is not important, and as my colleague Gareth observed out there will of course be some cultural variation but what is intuitively obvious is that the meanings conveyed (not necessarily the literal translations) by those words in the list add significantly more weight to your language skills than say a list of common foods, medical conditions and zoo animals (as entirely practical as those nouns and adjectives may be in specific scenarios with specific requirements).

So, why can the opposite (that is too much vocabulary) be counterproductive?  It is mainly a problem for beginners or casual learners who all need as much learning juice as possible (AKA motivation) to overcome the inevitable learning curve (AKA total confusion and frustration) when learning a language.  However it can also be a problem for more established learners, where “flashcard procrastination” can sneak into study patterns.

For the first group to maintain momentum and push through the frustration it is important to start meaningfully communicating as quickly as possible and thus start seeing reward for their effort.  Hours of work to memorise all the fruits and vegetables as opposed to Buzan’s Top 100 is not likely to achieve this unless you are a green grocer wanting to compare notes in a foreign country.  That sort of vocabulary is often best absorbed when you need it (i.e. looking it up before you go to a green grocer when you will be “in the mood”), and while I am certainly not saying it should never be studied pro actively just be aware of the relative importance of concepts you are trying to master and focus on learning key elements first.

“Flashcard procrastination” which affects more advanced students is where people make up for a period of ebbing enthusiasm by nailing a stack of new vocabulary.  Again, it is not to say this is not useful, it clearly adds to your knowledge and helps to keep the truck rolling, but I can say from personal experience it is often a very passive process that is often little more than a distraction.  Be conscious of this when you study and try and break your pattern if you feel yourself falling into it.

I overran the word limit a few paragraphs ago, so I will wrap it up and hope to receive any thoughts, complaints, arguments, suggestions below.  If you take one thing from this post it is this “not all words are created equal”.  Engage with your learning, focus on meaning and depth not just numbers and your language will improve dramatically.

Good luck!

Simon

Top 100 most useful words

from ‘Use Your Memory’, Tony Buzan, BBC Books, London, ISBN 0-5633-37102-1

1. a, an      2. after      3. again      4. all        5. almost
6. also       7. always     8. and        9. because    10. before
11. big       12. but       13. (I) can   14. (I) come  15. either/or
16. (I) find  17. first     18. for       19. friend    20. from
21. (I) go    22. good      23. goodbye   24. happy     25. (I) have
26. he        27. hello     28. here      29. how       30. I
31. (I) am    32. if        33. in        34. (I) know  35. last
36. (I) like  37. little    38. (I) love  39. (I) make  40. many
41. one       42. more      43. most      44. much      45. my
46. new       47. no        48. not       49. now       50. of
51. often     52. on        53. one       54. only      55. or
56. other     57. our       58. out       59. over      60. people
61. place     62. please    63. same      64. (I) see   65. she
66. so        67. some      68. sometimes 69. still     70. such
71. (I) tell  72. thank you 73. that      74. the       75. their
76. them      77. then      78. there is  79. they      80. thing
81. (I) think 82. this      83. time      84. to        85. under
86. up        87. us        88. (I) use   89. very      90. we
91. what      92. when      93. where     94. which     95. who
96. why       97. with      98. yes       99. you       100. Your
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Top 10 words and phrases to master when learning any language

Friday, March 12th, 2010

These days I spend a lot of time thinking about the process of learning a language: what are the common steps, what are the common pitfalls, which words or phrases are really the most use when you find yourself in a foreign airport wondering what to do next?!  Identifying high value concepts/elements in languages can speed up the learning process, by high value I mean words that can add maximum depth to your conversation with minimal learning overhead.

So, here we go; this is my top 10 most important words and phrases when starting a language. The list below is a bit of fun of course, but in all seriousness understanding which words/concepts are actually important to learn is a topic rarely discussed in traditional language courses.  It probably seems obvious when it’s raised but concentrating on how to name all the animals in the zoo is rarely as important as mastering joining words in a sentence, though for some reason many language learning tools seem to imply the opposite.

Quick update 16/03/2010: check out this post’s follow up article when you’re done below.

My top 10:

  1. “Hello” – for obvious reasons, just being able to say this usually wins serious browny points in a foreign country, people engage with people they perceive as making an effort.
  2. “Thank you” – again for obvious reasons, you can’t get by without this one.
  3. “There is” – in many languages can be interchanged with “is there?”, this can be broadly interpreted in many situations.
  4. “Already” – gives you context and can again be both a question and a statement in many languages.
  5. “This/That” – often the difference between the two can make a big difference in conversation.
  6. “Why?” – With a pointed finger can mean “why is it so?”, “why did you do it?”, “why is there a problem?”.  It can get you in to trouble when trying to understanding the answer but people can often interpret very laterally.
  7. “May I have” – or the equivalent, in many languages the literal translation is just “give me”, please and thank you are not required, either way understanding the convention can be very useful (and help you avoid taking/giving offence).
  8. “What” – obvious, the most important word for building your vocabulary, and or avoiding something dodgy in a village market stall!
  9. “I want” – this can indicate intent to do something in many languages as well as a desire.
  10. “Finished” – can often be interpreted as a question, a statement or a demand – all very useful at different times

I would  love to hear your thoughts on this below please do leave a comment;  share your Top 10,20,30 or a story about when some particular words have come in handy.

Simon

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