Individualize Your Language Learning: Listening-Speaking-Reading ...

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Ulrike Rettig

How do you learn best? Are you a visual learner? An auditory learner? Do you like grammar, or not? Are you a risk taker when you learn? Or are you more traditional? It's probably worth your while to track down the answer. Piece by piece, and deliberately. Being aware of HOW we learn makes learning so much more interesting and effective.

Research on left brain (logical, verbal, auditory, sequential) and right brain functions (creative, visual, spatial, emotional) has been ongoing for decades, and new imaging techniques have greatly enhanced our knowledge of how the brain works. See, for example, David A. Sousa's How the Brain Learns.

Though the left brain is the ?seat of language and processes in a logical and sequential order? language learning is best done when both the left brain and right brain are involved.

We don't learn a language just by listening (a left brain activity) and speaking, and kids don't do that either. Small children don't yet know how to read and write. Still, they pick up a lot of visual and other clues from people (facial expressions, gestures), their surroundings (objects, movement), the context of a conversation (asking for something, looking for a toy), etc. Once kids have learned to read and write, a mental ?text image? may start to play along. Because we live in a text-based world, wanting to know how a word ?looks? (is spelled) is part of language learning.

In any case, when I was learning Chinese strictly through listening, I found myself imagining how the word would be spelled with western letters. Without thinking about it, I used the ?regular? German sound-letter system for this. The pronunciation of almost every [German word] can be derived from its spelling.?When not too long ago, I was learning Italian by just listening, I spontaneously (and erroneously) used French spelling to imagine how the Italian words are written. I've come to realize that I best learn when I both hear and see a word or phrase.

Digital games are a perfect vehicle for individualized language learning. They have auditory (spoken language, sounds) and visual features (text, colors, images, design), as well as kinesthetic elements (typing against the clock, clicking on moving images, etc). If you want to focus on the sound, you can close your eyes or look away from the text. If you want to focus on a text, you can click on it several times to absorb it visually. You can rush through a game to simulate a rapid-fire conversation. Or you can linger on specific individual phrases or sentences. You can skip the writing games, or spend extra time with them. You can puzzle over grammar structures ? and to follow up, google the best free dictionary and grammar site that I know,?select your language, and type in the word. Or you can let your brain figure out the grammar intuitively. Don't we all have an innate capacity to decode basic grammar?

It's a mistake to think that you have to learn in any prescribed way. Go ahead and learn a language the way it best fits your learning style and personality. Language learning is made more fun that way!

Source: http://www.gamesforlanguage.com/blog/post/2011-08-individualize-your-language-learning-listening-speaking

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