Day one at the ACTFL Conference in San Diego. Over 5,000 delegates, mostly teachers and professors of languages. But these people do not only teach, they do research.
Yesterday I sat through a presentation by the head of the Chinese Language Teachers Association of America, a PhD in Linguistics and Chinese professor, on "Finding research topics and designing empirical studies on CFL." CFL is not the Canadian Football League that I am used to, but Chinese as a Foreign Language.
The presentation was supposed to last from 1 to 2.30, but did not finish much before 5, mostly a monologue in quite heavily accented English. I learned about such conclusions from research as: ( I have cleansed this of academic jargon)
a) Students learning Chinese characters had an easier time recognizing them than writing them, did better on characters with fewer strokes ,and those students who had trouble recognizing characters also had trouble writing them.
b) Students typically could only recognize 58% of characters even tough they had learned them, but if they could pronounce them this went up to 90%.
c) In a "reading strategy" study it was found that advanced learners, with more vocabulary, were better at processing characters rapidly and inferring meaning than intermediate level learners.
When someone suggested that these results were not exactly surprising, we were told that what was difficult was setting up rigid research parameters to ensure that the results were valid.
I wonder how much of this kind of research goes on, for all languages that are taught. I wonder what would happen to language learning in the world if there was a moratorium on all language learning research.
