"Imprinting errors in your brain?" The case for corrected written homework!

henning
December 11, 2007, 05:25 PM posted in General Discussion

This is actually a reaction to furyougaijin's post in the "CPod users can't read" thread. I think it needs a place of its own.

On the subject of producting Chinese posts without native speaker correction furyougaijin writes:

"[Without correction] it becomes an exercise of inventing your own Chinese language and imprinting your own (and other people's) errors in your brain."

 

Although I hate to admit it there is some truth to that point. Let me give "anecdotal evidence": 

I recently posted this in the 中国八大菜系 thread:

我的妻子看这种节目的时候,一直抱怨 "他们做得错", "这样不太好吃"等等 。 然后起来表演怎么做,证明她做的饭是独一无二的那么好。 因此我越来越胖。

When my wife read that she surprisingly became very angry - although I thought I made her a compliment with that message. "So I am only *trying* to cook better than those TV-clowns?". "No - as I wrote you *prove* you do better"! 证明 = prove - isn't it?".

It took a while to find out the source of the misunderstanding.
It was one of those beloved 了s that was missing.

The evidence is only valid if it reads: 证明了 [...]. Without a 了 the proving is not yet completed and therefore left in the state of just trying.

Point here: I learned a lot. But I made a serious grammar mistake that I did not recognize without native-speaker-input. 

 

But even in daily speech or CPod Practice Plan sessions this would probably have stayed unnoticed - below the waterline of recognition, buried under several layers of real-time-language-processing challenges.

 

My conclusion: There is a case for a written homework correction service that is independent of the Practice Plan. Although that might come costly for its users it might be worth it. 

 

By the way: Yes, I will indeed continue posting Chinese comments. Actively (!) remembering or looking up vocab, trying to piece sentences together and Google-checking expressions imprints lots of good and correct language into my brain that outweights all the errors. I am not making up a whole new language, I just make mistakes . I learned most of my faulty English that way.

But I hope you are all warned now.  :P

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RonInDC
December 11, 2007, 05:51 PM

I think about this concept a lot. That once someone understands the meaning of what you say, you use that particular expression going forward even if it's not the best linguistically. I see this a lot with non-native English speakers here in DC. A person can understand every word a native speaker says, but has 'imprinted' non-native language usage. I believe that much of it is inevitable, though.

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daizi
December 11, 2007, 06:51 PM

Actually, given enough comprehensible input, one can learn to speak (and yes, write) grammatical Chinese, without any native speaker corrections. However, you might not be able to explain why it's grammatical. For that, learning about the language through prescriptive intervention might prove helpful (or at least interesting). There's no evidence that it will aid acquisition, though.

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henning
December 12, 2007, 06:20 AM

xiaodai, I am convinced that correction is a shortcut for an adult learner, as are grammer rules. But I cannot prove that. Are there any studies on that?

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AuntySue
December 12, 2007, 07:31 AM

Henning, in your example, if you had written it on the Forum you probably would have gone back and corrected that error, optionally adding a note that it was edited to fix grammar, in order to prevent others stumbling. In the comments here, you could only add an additional comment about the error (if you wished to), which might appear a hundred comments down the page. People would still be learning your error and there's nothing you could do about it. That's why I regard uneditable comments as educationally unsound. Xiaodai, I really like the comprehensible input way of learning but there's a catch. Yesterday I was listening to a couple of Pimsleur Cantonese lessons where they keep asking the learner to generate similar sentences, saying "be careful about the word order", and as far as I can tell there are two very different patterns that are chosen arbitrarily. I'm going to have to consult a grammar book (not their intention!) or pick one pattern as my standard and settle for 50% incorrect. There's a danger in believing it's better for all students to work it out themselves, which it is, but you then must accept a duty to be there to catch those few who just don't get it at all, or worse, get it the wrong way round and "help" fellow students. For many teachers and courses, the cost of fulfilling that obligation is higher than their time budget allows.

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daizi
December 12, 2007, 02:47 PM

Henning & Auntie Sue, There are studies suggesting that adult learners might be the best learners of second language. They bring to the table their world knowledge and the ability to extrapolate from it. This knowledge includes grammar and other linguistic information, all of which can be an aid in making input comprehensible. And while there are many ways to learn, and many different learning styles, there is only one way all learners acquire language: that's just the way our brains have evolved.