3 ms·

might also be that a new language takes too much attention to focus on the visual. Even, lip-reading would take the visual focus.

mikekchar 10y ago
One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened. For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-( So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode. BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class. And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.

mikekchar 10y ago

One of the interesting things I learned teaching foreign languages is that people only remember things that they understand. That makes intuitive sense, but what I found most interesting is that if someone doesn't understand something, they will often forget that it ever happened. For example, I once asked my students to bring in their textbook for the next class. I was speaking English (foreign language for the students). Not one student in the 30 brought their textbook the next day. The weird thing is that not one of the students even remembered me saying something that they didn't understand. I've done a seminar where I demonstrate this effect. I say something in Japanese to an English speaking audience. I even make a remark about it. 20 minutes later I ask if anyone remembers me saying something in Japanese. Most people do not. Even after only 20 minutes people completely filter out things that don't make sense to them. When I saw this happening, I immediately found some scientific papers describing the effect. Unfortunately I seem to have lost all my notes so I don't have links handy any more :-( So, without knowing more, my guess is that the babies get confused with the foreign language and subsequently forget the whole episode. BTW, knowing this dramatically improved my teaching. If you realise that students who don't understand something in class will actually forget the entire class, you realise how important it is to probe understanding for every person in the class. And just to get a plug in because people often complain about the quality of education that their children get. I only taught for 5 years, but if there was one thing that I would concentrate on to improve education it's to reduce class sizes. I had classes of 43 (!) most of the time I was teaching. I had fifty minute classes. You can do the math to see how much time I had to help each student individually. In my last year, I restructured my classes reducing my "instruction" time (where I explain things) to 5 minutes a class. I spent the rest of the class probing and evaluating comprehension. Test scores improved dramatically across the board.