How to learn

How to learn

On May 23, 2013 by wrinklebump
This post by The Korean, a well-known blogger in Koreaphile circles, had me seriously considering (if only for a moment) what I know about immersion-style English teaching, which I have always favored and which has gained some traction in Korea, exemplified by the desperation with which parents try to enroll their kids in English-only kindergartens or international schools. But he mocks the notion of “fun” education and rolls out his prescription for mastering a second language. Monastic scholars might be the only group capable of finding some cold comfort in his remedy for monolingualism:

 

the Korean’s method relies entirely on rote memorization. The Korean cannot see why “rote memorization” became a dirty word in education somehow. How else are you going to learn words and grammar? Again, high school seniors know as many as 120,000 words. Do you think you can learn 120,000 words in one or two years just by “surrounding yourself with the language”? Please.

Language learning is like dieting. There might be tons of advertisement about fast results and magic formulas, but at the end of the day, honest effort is the only thing that works. only the undisciplined deludes herself into believing that some other magic might work. Want to lose weight? Eat healthier and exercise more. Want to master a second language? Memorize grammar and vocabulary. It is that simple.

 

I was, at first, a bit taken aback, having seen and worked in immersion settings (well, as immersive as possible given the circumstances) and witnessed firsthand how much better those students’ English was, compared to the kids learning by the traditional Korean teaching method employed everywhere else, that is, rote memorization.

 

But his argument was compelling, at least at first. I thought of my own experiences with a foreign language, and how it’s been mostly a story of laziness and failure. As I approach my third year in Korea and realize I know far less Korean than I should, it’s mostly because I just haven’t been disciplined in memorizing words and grammar. I have a veritable orgy of Korean textbooks in my apartment and not a one of their brilliantly white pages have seen a dusting of light in months. Where I have lacked the motivation and discipline to sit down and memorize some vocab the Korean just sucked it up and did it, and now he’s writing 2000-word essays on education in a foreign tongue. I’m totally surrounded by Korean, every day, and there’s been no osmosis whatsoever.

 

My educational worldview crushed, I retreated into thought and began to think about learning itself. Not education per se but rather the simple act of obtaining new knowledge. What is it? Then I realized: Why, it’s memory.

 

All learning is essentially memorization, is it not? When you learn how to play the piano, or the drums, or the bagpipes or the accordian you learn by making small improvements over a long period of time, with many repetitions. As you improve what you’re doing is remembering what you did wrong the first time around (and the second, and the third…) and remembering not to make the same mistake again. All acts of skill (as set apart from physical ability) employ essentially the same method. Cooking? You remember not to put so much salt in the casserole. Chess? You remember what fuckup got you checkmated last time. Golf? You remember not to break your wrists too early. Sex? You remember your partner’s various complaints and compliments and adjust your posture accordingly (or buy some new, err, supplies). Bartending? Not so much fucking vermouth, this isn’t France.

 

This is basically what our mind does: it remembers shit. Just about any individual technique, language included, is an ecosystem of small memories that are accessed during a performance. This explains why people don’t suddenly know how to play the violin or why most people can’t absorb the techniques required to build a fusion reactor from say sleeping in a library full of physics texts. We have to remember individual things and combine those memories to form knowledge.

Memories look like this without some exercise.

But how does this specifically relate to language learning? Doesn’t this seem to support The Korean’s prescription for language education?

 

The Korean’s error of judgement is that he separates his preferred method of rote learning from the “fun, immersive” kind that he mocks into two Caesar and Hannibal’s warring camps, forever at odds. But, you need only to recognize that all learning is essentially memorization; that the salient difference between rote learning and immersion learning is that the latter focuses on application, whereas the former makes no assumption about the use of knowledge. There is a lot of memorization in immersion settings because that’s what learning is.

 

And despite his protestations and a weak anecdote about playground cliques, The Korean learned English in an immersion setting too, with ample opportunities to apply what he had memorized. Indeed, he embarked on this education in order to apply it; his academic and personal victories at school were dependent upon the successful application of this new knowledge.

His original essay on the subject was written in response to a teacher of Korean high school kids, who wrote the following:

My name is The English Teacher. The English Teacher has a question for The Korean. The English Teacher read the Korean’s recent post about the interesting 바보 Ray. In that post, The Korean said that he came to America at the age of 16, without knowing English. The English Teacher can judge by The Korean’s prose that his written English is for all intents and purposes, perfect (unless The Korean employs an editor to raise said prose, which The English Teacher thinks is unlikely). The English Teacher wonders about The Korean’s spoken English. Do people know that The Korean is a non-native speaker when they hear him talk? If so, how noticeable is The Korean’s accent? How old is The Korean, if he doesn’t mind The English Teacher asking?

 

As a teacher of English to Korean high-school students, The English Teacher is merely curious about how much he can expect from his students, and what he can tell his students when they ask how much improvement they will see if they go to the US to study English.

The English Teacher

The Korean didn’t actually satisfy the writer’s curiosity as mentioned in the last paragraph, nor does he supply any methods for teaching by rote, excluding the teaching of one’s self. That’s likely because rote memorization as a teaching method has fallen so far out of favor among modern educators that even he, someone who presumably favors such a pedagogy, understands how useless it is in a classroom. Perhaps The Korean doesn’t find much use for classrooms. But that’s another matter.

Students don’t learn by rote if taught by rote. I’ve seen it every day since I’ve been here. Every teacher has. Every class aside from mine consists of tedious word and grammar memorization, and it fails all but the brightest kids. Perhaps 5 percent of my students could string together a few intelligible paragraphs on their favorite animal. Without immersion ? without constant recollection of small memories ? rote memorization is useless. It’s the difference between knowing how football is played verses actually playing football. Between a student of the game and an athlete. The bodies of knowledge both possess are entirely different.

So the best teaching method should be two-pronged: give students difficult language tasks to complete that require knowledge (application) and the tools to complete those tasks (words and grammar). The latter without the former yields disastrous results; one needn’t look much farther than the state of English education in Korean for confirmation of this.