言葉の勉強の見直し

「自分が無意識に習得した言葉がその言語での発声を促すし、流暢さの原でもあります。一方意識的に覚えた言葉は、考える時間がある場合、自分が編集者となり、形 (つまり、文の構造)に焦点を置き、例え、教室での文法テストの場合や丁寧に文章を書いている場合は、ルールに従います。」*1
ちょっと、分かりづらいですね。つまり、文法をいっぱい勉強するより、話せるようになるにはもっと効果的な方法があるということです。

A Little Extra Help

We went to America for the holidays. We spent over 3 weeks there with my parents. I was really hoping that this would get Noelle started speaking English.

The first two days on the airplane and on the road were tough for her. On the second day she was tired and rejecting English. She said to her mother, "I'm tired of Daddy's". She didn't know what to say but we knew what she meant. She was tired of everyone speaking English all of a sudden all of the time. It was difficult for her to understand and foreign. But she knew it was the same "language" that her daddy uses.

Pretty soon she became the center of attention. Everyone was trying to talk to her and everyone was trying to play with her. She started to warm up. She started trying, trying so hard, to communicate.

In the end she learned a lot of English and got started talking in English. Now she is back in Japanese mode and trying to speak Japanese to me more and more but I am resisting. We have been back now for a month. Right after we got back both Noelle and my wife were speaking a lot of English. I was so happy. They are reverting back to Japanese now. I must do something to keep up their English. We just have to speak more English at home.

Second Language Learning

I have started reading some articles about Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning by Greg Thomson. I have found them on a site called Language Impact's Language Learning Website. I have just finished reading Thomson's What? Me Worry About Language Learning? article. In it he talked about his experience and trails trying to learn new languages. In particular he talked about his experience and how he went about trying to learn Blackfoot. He also talks about why some people may be better at learning languages than others and why some languages may be more difficult for one person than another. It was very interesting for me and enlightening. The main gist of the article, other than being a primer for one who is thinking about starting to learn a new language, is that you have to have a good strategy. He says that a good strategy would include

• a time commitment,
  
• making yourself accountable,
  
• ways to keep improving your conversational ability, and
  
• a way to develop lots of relationships with speakers of the language you want to learn.

The first two should not be too difficult for most people to accomplish. The second and third strategies seem a bit more difficult. What if there are no or very few native speakers of the language you want to learn?

Well, anyways, I hope that this new insight into language learning will help me develop better activities and methods for teaching English. Although one of the things that he repeatedly stresses is that it is extremely difficult to learn a second language in a language class. 頑張るぞォ