Fossilization: Is It Terminal, Doctor? | The New School
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- Опубліковано 3 сер 2014
- The School of Languages at The New School (www.newschool.edu/public-engag...) presents, “Fossilization: Is it Terminal, Doctor?” a lecture by Scott Thornbury discussing the methodology of moving language learners beyond the “plateau” of understanding to a higher plane of language comprehension.
It's a truism, perhaps, that many learners reach a ‘plateau', beyond which no amount of instruction or use seems able to budge them. Are there any (psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic) grounds for believing that this so-called fossilization is terminal? What does it take to move a learner beyond the plateau? Based on his own experience of attempting to kick-start his fossilized Spanish, the speaker will look at the role of such factors as classroom instruction, extensive reading, vocabulary memorization and real language use as possible antidotes to ‘arrested development' in a second language.
Scott Thornbury (MATEFL, with distinction, University of Reading, UK, www.scottthornbury.com/), a native of New Zealand who now lives in Spain, is currently series editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Teachers series. He has been a prolific writer of books and articles for teachers and students and a tireless presenter at international ELT conferences, sharing the knowledge gained from his more than 30 years of experience as a teacher, teacher trainer, writer and researcher.
Thursday, July 31, 2014 at 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street
Thank you so much Doctor Thornbury for this informative lecture. I liked it as an anecdote more than the whole data presented in a research report. I am a Colombian English teacher so I can relate to what it feels like to learn a second language. And yes, the subjunctive mood in English gave some trouble. I just did not undestand why i had to say "It is time we went home" when in Spanish we would translate "It is time we go home". Wonderful lecture and i enjoyed it.
I'm an ESL teacher working in Colombia. I have a pupil in his late twenties, an engineer who has just got a new job where he will be using English every day. He dearly wants to improve, and is diligent and bright. However he has various fossilized aspects which let down his spoken and written communication. He is by my estimate a B2, however he has several ingrained errors at way below the B2 level, eg. when narrating an anedote, the first verb will be in the simple past but every subsequent one will be in the simple present. When I point it out, he can always correct himself within seconds. He wants to change, and we have been working on this for two month (not all the time in our classes but at least once every class out of 2x 2hour sessions a week). I started out gently pointing it out, then getting him to write out narrations in the past tense, now we´re doing grammar drills, still he has it. Is loads of input the answer, does he have to listen to simple narrations in the past tense? It´s obviously never been corrected before and years of speaking and writing like this have reinforced it. Maybe his peers had this too. Where do I go with it? He will need to write at a B2 level, and this will be a problem for him.
Thank you for sharing this lecture. I remembered my CAE results while I was watching your talk: I have presented it twice and the second was worse than the first one although I knew the exam...!
Very intriguing. Great speaker, a wealth of knowledge gained. Will recommend this to my colleagues.
After looking at your blog recently I have just found this presentation of its topic, contents etc which I have found very interesting. I have a similar experience of these feelings with respect to Catalan after living and teaching TEFLA in Cerdanyola for 20 years. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, experiences, anecdotes and advice.
Thanks ofr sharing, very informative and humorous. I like this idea of Rod of stablization than fossilization. The latter is in my view absurd; nothing could stop human capacities. Logically, when we arrive at the business of learning a foreign language, we tend to learn many things very fast; all is new to us and simple things are acquired so fast. But, after a while there is little to learn and the reamining or unlearned items are so complex; consequently, progress is very slow and motivation for learning more is very low since we have a sense of satisfactionof what we want to know. It's like we give up the business. It's much like sitting with a stranger. At first chat we learn and exchange a lot of things, but later only small pieces are sometimes exchanged.
I have watched a few of his lectures so far before this one. And this time I have to conclude that his attitude towards foreign language learning sadly is typical of native speakers of only English. Now ,being aware of his own struggles, I do understand his idea of fluency ( somewhat ackward to me) which he tends to promote and which very strongly differs from how majority of European linguists view this topic.
As for this lecture : 1 yes , fossilizaton exists. I would say it's more like fluency freezing at certain point. Luckily our lingustic skills can be defrosted if one is willing to make an effort. This is what happened to me with my L1- Russian which got frozen at "young adult fluency" level since I moved out from Russia at young age. So now I'm missing typical adult-like elements of slang, curse words etc. But working on it. Although I have no other problems whatsoever with general Russian- listening, speaking, writting, grammar, reading books etc.
2. Yes, it is a matter of professional credibility to master at least one foreign language if one wants to educate teachers how to teach foreign languages. I wouldn't trust a bit someone who has never experienced foreign language aqusition process as a student himself.
3. I really cannot comprehend how he cannot see a Subjuntive mode in Spanish as being a priority for his learning process, given how important this mode is for practical usage of this language.
Summing up: now I understand where his views come from. And now it seems to me that as an expert in language learning he should restrict himself only to talking about teaching English as L2, since looks like he doesn't really have much background for talking aboout foreign language aqusition in general. The fact that Subjunctive is disappearing in English (as someone has mentioned in here) doesn't mean that this is the case for other European languages. In case of Romance language group this mode prevails and we can encounter it literary everywhere. One cannot master Spanish, French or Italian without decent understanding of this mode. Catalan as a mixture of both French and Spanish also needs a huge amount of time spent on mastering Subjuntive mode. What native English speakers probably fail to figure out- mastering Subjunctive in one romance language can be treated as transfarable skill for the rest of the languages from the same group. Since basic rules of usage are almost completely alike in all romance languages, with some minor specific differences in each language due some more colloquial forms of usage.
As for his advice on teaching: if I were teaching only English as L2 as a native speaker of it and no other language I would probably find his lectures convincing and useful. As a native speaker of three L1 ones, only one of them being English and someone who both learns and teaches various foreign languages to speakers of various L1 ones I do have to take what he says with a grain of salt.
Beware of his exaggeration here. Although a New Zealander he embodies the typical English self-deprecative humour, so when he says "I have no subjunctive", *that* is what should be taken with a pinch of salt. I´m sure he didn´t get to B2/C1 level with zero knowledge of the subjunctive. The subjunctive in Spanish has easy aspects, and more difficult aspects. I think he is acknowledging that he is on the path, rather than a master. Us English speakers from the British (as opposed to US) sphere of influence tend to be very modest. I do not see that he is playing down the importance of learning the subjunctive in Spanish.
And fossilization is more like what happened with my Colombian student who I mentioned in another comment: he was B2 in many things (vocabulary, listening comprehension, passive voice grammar, can recognise and form all the tenses), but he had some A2 level errors, which presumably entered his English at an early stage, e.g. at school, and had never been corrected (externally or self-corrected) so he continued to progress in other areas, while reinforcing (or fossilizing) his A2 errors (e.g. using present tense instead of past, forgetting to add S for plurals) to the point that they became unconscious.
Native speaker of English studying other languages, can you reverse grammar difficulty you run into onto English language?
He said one single phrase in Spanish and his accent sucks. So, that contradicts his own theories since he´s been living in Spain for 31 years¡¡¡¡
Hmm Roberto, he openly acknowledges that he had reached a comfortable but imperfect level. A level that was functional for his (limited) needs.