Gulliver wrote:Hmm… doesn't French have about ten or so vowel sounds? That might get unwieldy. I don't actually see a problem with French pronunciation… it's writing what you heard that's tricky, not reading what you've written. Also, you'd have to make sure that the colours are accessible to those who are colour-blind.
Perhaps you could do a corpus study of gender errors between English and Spanish learners writing in French, looking at whether Spanish learners are more likely to calque their own L1's gender onto French nouns than English speakers. Of course, such a corpus would have to exist.
Gah, the colorblind, always making things difficult.
Actually your idea sounds fascinating if only I myself didn't fail so bad at French gender. I could find a corpus, maybe, but it might be better to stick to something education-related. It would look better on my resume.
Viktor77 wrote:2). Developing a mini lesson in general rules of grammar. Don't worry those who believe I have a terrible understanding of grammar, I'd work with an English professor. The idea is that students learning a foreign language lack an appropriate general grammatical knowledge which makes language learning difficult. If you can't break down English, how can you break down Spanish?
I would think the fact that fluent English speakers can't break down English is prima facie evidence that you don't need to learn how to break down Spanish to become fluent in it. Which is to say, I think it would be a very interesting thesis if you were able to convincingly demonstrate otherwise.
Viktor77 wrote:2). Developing a mini lesson in general rules of grammar. Don't worry those who believe I have a terrible understanding of grammar, I'd work with an English professor. The idea is that students learning a foreign language lack an appropriate general grammatical knowledge which makes language learning difficult. If you can't break down English, how can you break down Spanish?
I would think the fact that fluent English speakers can't break down English is prima facie evidence that you don't need to learn how to break down Spanish to become fluent in it. Which is to say, I think it would be a very interesting thesis if you were able to convincingly demonstrate otherwise.
I think that would require an immersion environment. I can't think of anyway except through immersion that one can acquire a language without grammatical study.
Viktor77 wrote:I think that would require an immersion environment. I can't think of anyway except through immersion that one can acquire a language without grammatical study.
There are immersion environments, and there are immersion environments. See my post here. It might go beyond the scope of your thesis, but I think it'd be quite interesting to compare speed of acquisition of a class that used grammatical study to that of a class that didn't.
Viktor77 wrote:I think that would require an immersion environment. I can't think of anyway except through immersion that one can acquire a language without grammatical study.
There are immersion environments, and there are immersion environments. See my post here. It might go beyond the scope of your thesis, but I think it'd be quite interesting to compare speed of acquisition of a class that used grammatical study to that of a class that didn't.
I recently read an excerpt of Rousseau that talked about this same thing except with geography. Very interesting stuff. I doubt I could cover it in my thesis (a good dissertation topic, though), but I'm now going to look up studies just for interest.
