The thing is, the same is true for everyone. More of the brain is dedicated to processing visual information than any other sense, so we are all capable of learning more by sight than anything else.

Skits and games have their use, and that is related to the thing being taught. It makes a lot of sense to play games when learning about directions, because then you're using the concept and meaning in a natural way. Suggesting people who like using maps are "analytical learners" and people who like walking about are "active learners" is pushing it.

The thing that particularly worries me about learning styles in the context of language is that it makes excuses for people who get trapped on paper: "I need to see the words written down, because I'm a visual learner." I've met far too many people who can't speak or understand spoken language, and rationalise it away as being "visual learners". You can "cheat" at reading and writing in a way you can't with spoken language.

In French, for example, I know a lot of self-professed "visual learners" who don't know the difference between E, É and È, because you don't need to know it to read a page, and they can blag writing on memory.

Another problem is that of word order. Have you ever known any Irish learners who persistently try to start their sentences with the subject rather than the verb? I've met a fair few Scottish Gaelic learners who do, and some of them have been following fairly rigorous courses for a reasonable amount of time. How can something so basic escape them? The only conclusion I can reach is that they're reading wrong; that they're plucking the words off the page and rearranging them rather than reading them in order. When they're writing, they start composing out of order, then they put them in order and don't start writing until they've constructed the first bit of the sentence. And when you look at the amount of time given to beginning learners in tests, it seems to be designed to fit this strategy, so training students to pass the exam means training them to approach the language incorrectly.

(Sorry, I do tend to go off on rants about this sort of thing.)

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

I'm not able to make the Portland weekend (that would be a good two-day drive for me, and we're leaving for a week's trip to Nevada and Arizona on Sunday anyway), but as this fellow is to be one of the teachers in Los Angeles in May, I'll be looking forward to seeing if he brings any of these ideas with him. I don't know what level he'll be teaching, but I'm sure we'll get a chance to chat at some point.

Redwolf

Yes, that will be interesting, I'm just curious to see exactly what they are. I've seen so many advertisements about people teaching Irish and they really don't have it. It may just be that their promos don't do them justice. I'm sure the LA group will have someone up to par. Enjoy your trip.

I know that at least one of the teachers is a native speaker because I know her (She lives in Mountain View, and I've been to several convo groups at her home. She's a native speaker from Ardara). I don't know which level she's teaching, though.

Redwolf

Dia daoibh -

I'm a student of Irish, and the creative director of the non-profit organization that puts on the immersion events here in Portland. I'd be happy to answer any questions about it, but in response to some of the comments, it actually works best if you're at least 11 yrs or older, with the best players in their late teens or early twenties. But hey, I'm 40 and I do fine, and most players are 30 or older, with a few regulars at our events in their 60s. Children can play but they're definitely not as good as adults.

The sign and gesture is just there to get players started. Learning styles, those have been largely discredited, so I don't know anything about that. I know it looks crazy. We only do it because it works like a charm. If it didn't work, believe me, we wouldn't do it, precisely because at first blush folks don't respond well to it. But it definitely works some language magic. People start having conversations. It's great. That's all that matters to us.

The goal of the language game is to get people talking and increase fluency - that's about it. We don't do much with reading, writing, or grammar - we just play with navigating real-life situations immersed in the Irish language.

Check out http://blog.languagehunters.org for pictures from this last event.

Niall, I'm not sure where you got your info from - the Language Hunters org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and most or all of our stuff is creative commons and free. Secrets?!? (Yes, I was a co-developer at WAYK, whose stuff is also creative commons and free. I don't really see the problem.)

RedWolf, I think you'll have some great stories after that event in LA. Brían, the Irish speaker who hosts our events, will be down there teaching and I think he'll blow your minds.

We're just here to get more folks speaking Irish together - that's it!

Gaeltachtaí or Bust.

Sounds good to me. Go n'éirí go geal leis!

_________________

OK, so I was wrong about the status of your company. The problem of secrets still stands, because my biggest problem with both LH and WAYK is the terminology. Using your own terms exclusively hides the fact that most of what you do is actually pretty standard stuff, and that prevents the new teacher from getting access to the big picture. It makes it harder for them to assess it critically, and harder to make adjustments or improvements as required.

The basic WAYK game is (ASL excepted) something that a lot of "immersive" teachers already use. When I did my CELTA, we were given an introduction to Finnish so we could experience the feeling of being absolute beginners in the classroom. After a short bit of "good morning" and "my name is...", entirely in Finnish, we moved on to "what is it...?" with various items including a toy plane, a toy car and (of course) a key -- for the same reason you use keys: it's something a teacher will almost always have available. It extended into asking "Is it a plane?" etc for yes/no answers. I also spent a year at the Scottish Gaelic college, and one of the teachers was constantly aped by the lower-level students for his signature "what is it? Is it a head?" lesson.

As the WAYK "game" gets more complicated, it morphs into a variation on the style of teaching dubbed "Total Physical Response" by James Asher in the 1960s -- giving commands and making requests, with the aim of making the language lesson more active.

Given all that, this statement seems ever so slightly strong:
...because language hunting is evolutionary. In fact, later in the book you contradict that statement:
...followed by a list of existing methods and techniques, starting with (of course) TPR.

Don't get me wrong -- I think there's an awful lot of good in what you're doing. However, I think you've fallen into the psychiatrist/psychologist trap.

What's the one problem with psychiatrists? They try to solve everything with medication.
What's the one problem with psychologists? They try to solve everything with therapy.

There are some problems that are better dealt with through medication, and others that are better dealt with by therapy, but it's the curse of the specialist to want to solve every problem with his own speciality.

Part of the justification for WAYK/LH is turning native speakers into teachers with minimal training, thereby getting teachers where no professional teaching is available or likely to be available -- it is ideally suited for this. But when you started making instructional materials in video form based on a mostly-unmodified version of your techniques (and in particular for Irish, a language with a very large teaching industry!), I felt you'd completely missed your own point, and wandered off into uncritical belief in your own methods.

By failing to recognise the limits of your own techniques, you do new teachers a disservice, because you don't prepare them for learning the techniques they're going to need to move beyond the level that can be taught using WAYK/LH.

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

NiallBeag,

Thanks for expanding on what you said - I think I understand your frustrations better, and honestly, in large part I agree with you, I think.

At the time I wrote the Language Hunter's Kit I was dealing with a lot of frustrations - I felt like the grammar-first approach I experienced in school and college was dominating the landscape. I still think this is largely true, but the fact is that language hunting (and WAYK) wouldn't exist if it there wasn't a whole lot else going on too. The Language Hunter's Kit book is written, I can't "take it back", but honestly, my goals are no longer "revolutionary" - I'm just determined to help the world of Irish language education get as many people talking to each other, casually and enjoyably, as possible.

I do still think there is insufficient support for regenerating daily conversational life in Irish - and I would say 9 out of 10 of our game event attendees agree. Of course, there are always those who, through talent or some other mystery, flourish on texts and so on, but I meet an awful lot of folks who don't. So I keep doing the work for them.

Your "secrets" comment drives me crazy, as ironically I'm doing everything I can to make language hunting as clear as possible over the internet, free of jargon. It's feedback like you're giving me now (thanks)0 that's lacking. We produce loads of stuff, but asides from the occasional comment I still don't know how successful our "internet-video-only" approach is right now.

There's a creative commons language hunting game set you can get here that is my latest attempt to clarify the approach, please download it off the google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum ... ge-hunters

An aside: I do also want to mention that even my own players throw the phrase "LH/WAYK" around quite a bit, and though certainly language hunting wouldn't exist without WAYK getting it started, they are very different things. Though the Language Hunter's Kit has good stuff in it, it's a bit of date with the work we're doing now too. I'm keeping it available for historical purposes, but Language Hunting is now an actual game, not a teaching or learning approach. There is a game board, card decks, etc. We don't mark "teaching techniques", explain theory, push for folks to adopt one specific approach, or any of that. I'm not informed on what the WAYK folks are doing but I know they've continued to develop their in their own direction, and I assume it still falls in line with what you're saying.

So basically, yes, the more I've done this work the more I have come to agree with you.

Language Hunting is just another piece of the overall picture of support that Irish learners (like myself) can use to revitalize the language in their daily life. It's definitely not "the" answer.

Anyway, thanks for your honest and clear response.

yrs,
Willem

I don't think "grammar first" is the problem, but something else in the methodology. Language is a series of choices, and most grammar-heavy courses don't actually present a lot of choice, instead relying on repetition of form... but if we repeat the same form over and over again, we are just "juggling" it in working memory, and not training long-term recall.

Immersive techniques rely on repetition, because there's no easy way to introduce variety without introducing confusion.

To see a grammar-first approach that introduces wide variety, I recommend trying one of Michel Thomas's CD courses (French, Spanish, Italian or German - the others carrying his name weren't written by him). He is constantly recombining taught language in different ways so that you have to choose and recall language from long-term memory, rather than just manipulating a form in working memory. Teaching this way requires a deep understanding of the language, of course, which is why I recognise the value in an approach such as yours that can be taught quickly and unambiguously (as opposed to, say, a CELTA course which takes a month but leaves you with no complete picture, but enough rope to hang yourself, or a degree in language education which gives you a complete picture but takes years).

Jargon is inevitable, and most attempts to eliminate it end up simply inventing a new jargon. My approach to jargon is summed up in a blog post I wrote a year ago about introductions. In short: most people make the mistake of starting with a term and then giving a definition, eg "the genitive is...", and the reader's reaction is "I don't understand this word," so they read the whole explanation in a state of confusion, and with less space in working memory, as they're trying to keep this strange new word in their head. If instead you start by explaining, and end with "... and we call this 'the genitive'," the reader just hangs the label on the concept previously described, and if the description is relatively clear, there is never any confusion.
I'll have a look, thanks.

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

(Incidentally, this discussion just saved my bacon. I sat down to prepare for a one-on-one (English) class and discovered that tasks I'd been given were only suitable for group lessons, and it turned out that a lot of the topics to be covered in the first few weeks fitted into that style of lesson quite nicely...)

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.