By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard, Ap Medical Writer – Tue Jul 21, 3:08 am ET
WASHINGTON – The best time to learn a foreign language: Between birth and age 7. Missed that window?
New research is showing just how children's brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.
"We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults," says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.
Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.
Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn't distinguish between the "L" and "R" sounds of English — "rake" and "lake" would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.
Time out — how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there's a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.
Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl's research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don't fit.
"You're building a brain architecture that's a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French," whatever is native, Kuhl explains — or, if you're a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.
It's remarkable that babies being raised bilingual — by simply speaking to them in two languages — can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.
Italian researchers wondered why there wasn't a delay, and reported this month in the journal Science that being bilingual seems to make the brain more flexible.
The researchers tested 44 12-month-olds to see how they recognized three-syllable patterns — nonsense words, just to test sound learning. Sure enough, gaze-tracking showed the bilingual babies learned two kinds of patterns at the same time — like lo-ba-lo or lo-lo-ba — while the one-language babies learned only one, concluded Agnes Melinda Kovacs of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies.
While new language learning is easiest by age 7, the ability markedly declines after puberty.
"We're seeing the brain as more plastic and ready to create new circuits before than after puberty," Kuhl says. As an adult, "it's a totally different process. You won't learn it in the same way. You won't become (as good as) a native speaker."
Yet a soon-to-be-released survey from the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit organization that researches language issues, shows U.S. elementary schools cut back on foreign language instruction over the last decade. About a quarter of public elementary schools were teaching foreign languages in 1997, but just 15 percent last year, say preliminary results posted on the center's Web site.
What might help people who missed their childhood window? Baby brains need personal interaction to soak in a new language — TV or CDs alone don't work. So researchers are improving the technology that adults tend to use for language learning, to make it more social and possibly tap brain circuitry that tots would use.
Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.
Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.
"It's our very first, preliminary crude attempt but the gains were phenomenal," says Kuhl.
But she'd rather see parents follow biology and expose youngsters early. If you speak a second language, speak it at home. Or find a play group or caregiver where your child can hear another language regularly.
"You'll be surprised," Kuhl says. "They do seem to pick it up like sponges."
EDITOR's NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
Tuesday 21 July 2009
Sunday 14 June 2009
Redefining how we work with words
Learning English
The Guardian Weekly
Friday March 27th 2009
Jamie Keddie
A crop of new websites offer some intriguing and engaging ways for learners and teachers to work with words. Jamie Keddie takes a look at the sites that are redefining the way we can teach vocabulary.
Imagine a dictionary with definitions accompanied by video clips of users talking about what the words mean to them. This is the idea behind Wordia.com, a project that combines conventional dictionary definitions with meanings created by users and explained in short videos.
Although sparse at the moment, its video content is increasing. Some of it comes from celebrity speakers, such as the British illustrator Quentin Blake, who gives a much more personal definition of “illustration” than the lexicographers.
Other contributors include the user Sab, who shares a mnemonic way of remembering how to spell “because” (“Big Elephants Can’t Always Use Small Entrances because of their size”); and user Davyboy who demonstrates the word “power” from the top of a castle, with a villainous laugh.
According to Wordia’s co-founder Ed Baker, the site is not just rewriting the dictionary. “We’re asking members of the public to redefine it. Through the medium of video, we have the potential to export all the additional dynamic layers of meaning that conventional dictionaries have never been able to deal with.”
For language teachers and learners, Wordia offers engaging opportunities for group work, such as creating and uploading clips that illustrate favourite words or new vocabulary.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Wordia is its simplicity. The same could be said about the more established Wordie.org, a site that allows users to create, share and comment on lists of words and phrases.
According to its creator John McGrath, the site was built more or less as a joke before taking on a life of its own. Community members often describe themselves as logophiles (word lovers) or nerds. Wordie is home to 200,000 “unique” definitions, such as “coolth”, which we are told is the opposite of warmth. Word lists include personal compilations such as “words I overuse when public speaking” or “swear words I’ve invented”.
But the facility to create personalised structured word lists online also means that Wordie is a tool for learners. In class, different students could be in charge of different word lists which are added to as and when new vocabulary arrives. One of my lists is of two-syllable adjectives that end in –y. It contains words such as bossy, nosy, cheesy, sweaty, silly, holy, creepy, pretty, and it was created after one of my students had admitted to being confused by the plethora of similar such words.
Wordie also allows users to comment on their own lists or those of other people. For a list of easily mispronounced words, for example, students could share tips on how to remember specific sounds (the “ea” in breakfast is pronounced like the “e” in bed – breakfast in bed).
Both Wordia and Wordie allow learners to engage with language in their own way. This combination of creativity and personalisation is well demonstrated by Wordle.net.
Wordle is an online tool that is used to create word clouds – randomised visual representations of all the words contained within a selected text. The more frequently a word is used in the source text, the larger it will appear in the word cloud.Wordle gives users the ability to decide whether or not to include common words, such as articles and prepositions, in the cloud. The resulting images can be printed or incorporated into other documents and used as the basis for classroom activities.
Although never intended as an educational tool, the site has become steadily more popular with teachers and learners. The word cloud can be used as a warm-up before reading or listening. Students can be asked to predict the genre or subject of the source text by looking at a word cloud created from it. Does the word cloud suggest a newspaper article, song lyric, joke, poem or dialogue? This approach has the advantage of activating key vocabulary. For productive language skills, word clouds can be used to reactivate short texts that students have already seen before going on to reconstruct them.
Sites such as these remind us of the potential of the internet as both a teaching resource and as a means of equipping learners with tools necessary for their autonomous development. In a time when we are bombarded with the latest things, it is always good to remember that it’s not the technology that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts.
Jamie Keddie is a teacher and writer. His website, teflclips.com, which supports teachers who are using video sharing websites, is one of the winners of the British Council’s 2009 Eltons awards for innovation in ELT.
The Guardian Weekly
Friday March 27th 2009
Jamie Keddie
A crop of new websites offer some intriguing and engaging ways for learners and teachers to work with words. Jamie Keddie takes a look at the sites that are redefining the way we can teach vocabulary.
Imagine a dictionary with definitions accompanied by video clips of users talking about what the words mean to them. This is the idea behind Wordia.com, a project that combines conventional dictionary definitions with meanings created by users and explained in short videos.
Although sparse at the moment, its video content is increasing. Some of it comes from celebrity speakers, such as the British illustrator Quentin Blake, who gives a much more personal definition of “illustration” than the lexicographers.
Other contributors include the user Sab, who shares a mnemonic way of remembering how to spell “because” (“Big Elephants Can’t Always Use Small Entrances because of their size”); and user Davyboy who demonstrates the word “power” from the top of a castle, with a villainous laugh.
According to Wordia’s co-founder Ed Baker, the site is not just rewriting the dictionary. “We’re asking members of the public to redefine it. Through the medium of video, we have the potential to export all the additional dynamic layers of meaning that conventional dictionaries have never been able to deal with.”
For language teachers and learners, Wordia offers engaging opportunities for group work, such as creating and uploading clips that illustrate favourite words or new vocabulary.
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Wordia is its simplicity. The same could be said about the more established Wordie.org, a site that allows users to create, share and comment on lists of words and phrases.
According to its creator John McGrath, the site was built more or less as a joke before taking on a life of its own. Community members often describe themselves as logophiles (word lovers) or nerds. Wordie is home to 200,000 “unique” definitions, such as “coolth”, which we are told is the opposite of warmth. Word lists include personal compilations such as “words I overuse when public speaking” or “swear words I’ve invented”.
But the facility to create personalised structured word lists online also means that Wordie is a tool for learners. In class, different students could be in charge of different word lists which are added to as and when new vocabulary arrives. One of my lists is of two-syllable adjectives that end in –y. It contains words such as bossy, nosy, cheesy, sweaty, silly, holy, creepy, pretty, and it was created after one of my students had admitted to being confused by the plethora of similar such words.
Wordie also allows users to comment on their own lists or those of other people. For a list of easily mispronounced words, for example, students could share tips on how to remember specific sounds (the “ea” in breakfast is pronounced like the “e” in bed – breakfast in bed).
Both Wordia and Wordie allow learners to engage with language in their own way. This combination of creativity and personalisation is well demonstrated by Wordle.net.
Wordle is an online tool that is used to create word clouds – randomised visual representations of all the words contained within a selected text. The more frequently a word is used in the source text, the larger it will appear in the word cloud.Wordle gives users the ability to decide whether or not to include common words, such as articles and prepositions, in the cloud. The resulting images can be printed or incorporated into other documents and used as the basis for classroom activities.
Although never intended as an educational tool, the site has become steadily more popular with teachers and learners. The word cloud can be used as a warm-up before reading or listening. Students can be asked to predict the genre or subject of the source text by looking at a word cloud created from it. Does the word cloud suggest a newspaper article, song lyric, joke, poem or dialogue? This approach has the advantage of activating key vocabulary. For productive language skills, word clouds can be used to reactivate short texts that students have already seen before going on to reconstruct them.
Sites such as these remind us of the potential of the internet as both a teaching resource and as a means of equipping learners with tools necessary for their autonomous development. In a time when we are bombarded with the latest things, it is always good to remember that it’s not the technology that matters, it’s what you do with it that counts.
Jamie Keddie is a teacher and writer. His website, teflclips.com, which supports teachers who are using video sharing websites, is one of the winners of the British Council’s 2009 Eltons awards for innovation in ELT.
Sunday 24 May 2009
Good site for ELT material
Good site for material, lots of worksheets, worksheet creator, flashcards and much more.
Saturday 16 May 2009
Food for thought
Watch this video, it's really good for reflecting about our teaching and the future of teaching.
Monday 11 May 2009
The alphabet
Hello, everybody! For all of those who don’t know me I’m Mariana. Newbie but glad to be part of CI Zona Sul teachers team.
My first post is dedicated to one of those ideas that come out of nowhere. I don’t know about you, but my best moves happen exactly when I’m in the middle of something – specially during a game.
Teaching the alphabet
As some of you know, teaching the alphabet can be extremely boring. Well, not anymore!
If you’re teaching kids a good way to introduce the alphabet is by telling your group they’ve become all rappers. As you are introducing the sounds, tell students to repeat after you and follow the rhythm.
Begin with the usual A, B, C. And go back with C, B, A. Then try another random trios. Save the most difficult sounds to the middle. Then repeat one letter only (j- j- j or k-k-k). Also you can introduce the rappers (a.k.a the students) by saying “DJ” before their names.
It’s really fun! I can tell you: they just l-o-v-e it!
I hope I was somewhat useful!
Mariana
Saturday 9 May 2009
Friday 8 May 2009
Controversies in using technology in language teaching
"The use of technology in language teaching is more and more common nowadays and teachers are taking advantage of this tool. However, there are some controversies in the use of technology. Read more about it in the article below".
Cheers
Tanya
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