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Viliam comments on Studying Your Native Language - Less Wrong
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As an American teacher of high school English, with a passion for spaced repetition software, I feel like it is my duty to respond to this post. My answer may surprise you.
If your goals are simply to understand more of what you read and to write more effectively, trying to skill up your general English skills strikes me as rather suboptimal.
Sure, a mastery of common word fragments will improve your ability to make at least some sense of unfamiliar words that use them -- I certainly teach these -- but you probably already know the most useful ones. I’m also unconvinced that etymology deepens comprehension much; usually, we want to understand someone, not somewords; this comes from understanding what that person intended to communicate, not from unlocking obscure arcana behind the words they happened to use.
Most of what is known to help reading comprehension is language independent, as is most of what is known to help you write better. I certainly don’t think Paul Graham’s skill as an essayist has much to do with his English; if he knows a second language even marginally well, I’m sure he would write in it nearly as effectively. To wit, he eschews esoteric explication. Writing is a craft, not a lookup table.
The strongest predictor of how well someone will do on a comprehension test of a given passage is how much they already know about the topic of that passage. A knowledge of the domain-specific vocabulary for that topic is either the second strongest predictor, or the same thing, depending on who you ask. General purpose vocabulary is farther down the list, and as an educated native speaker, you, again, are unlikely to find much low-hanging fruit in that area. So rather than take another level in English, I would suggest you consider which domains you want to be able to understand more of, and just start reading more in those domains, looking up words as needed. The language you do it in is almost irrelevant.
Consider: in the 6 credit hours of theory and practice for teachers of English Language Learners my state requires all teachers to take, I was taught that teenagers acquiring English as their second language are best off when they can continue learning domain specific concepts in their native language while waiting for their English to mature enough to transfer this knowledge over. Otherwise, they gain conversational English fluency but miss out on their first, best chance to learn foundational abstract concepts in, say, Science, Math, or Social Studies, leaving them without the ability to talk or even think about these subjects in any language.
With all the above in mind, when it comes to Anki cards and vocabulary, I am convinced that a great example sentence is much more useful than a great denotative definition. Connotations matter, and a visualizable, narratable context goes far both in conveying the extra implications of a word and in providing hooks for one’s memory. Still, you’re unlikely to absorb the deep flavor of the word -- the full intent of one who wields it fluently -- without encountering the word many times in varied contexts.
I say this in part because I acquired a sizable Spanish vocabulary from a time living in Spain decades ago, and there are to this day a number of words common to my internal monologue that are Spanish simply because they capture the flavor of the concept more perfectly than my closest English equivalents. But this is only the case for words that I encountered on enough authentic occasions to build that full connotative sense. Ones I merely studied out of the dictionary never reached that level, no matter how well I mastered them from a recognition and recall standpoint.
As any programmer will tell you, leveling skills in one language will have knock-on effects on your abilities in other languages, whether they are similar or not; the similar ones give you skills that transfer very directly, while the dissimilar ones broaden your conceptual toolset for approaching programs in general. If a problem might be more tractable within the intricacies of language suited to it, by all means, go deep into that language. But if you’re trying to understand say, an algorithm or a data structure, study that.
Do you remember the source for this? Because what you described here was very fashionable in my country, at least a few years ago -- having schools where students not only learn English (as a second language), but also learn all subjects in English, so it deepens their language skills.
Confirmed. On the other hand, there is also something that I call "writing C++ code in Java", that is: forcing the idioms of one language to another, even when the other language provides specialized tools to deal with the situation.
(Specifically: Someone with a history of C++ will prefer to use abstract class hierarchies, complain about the lack of multiple inheritance, and consider interfaces to be merely an inferior form of classes, when writing a code in Java. While the natural way of writing Java code would be to construct interface hierarchies, and treat classes as mere implementations of them. I am writing this here because it took me a few years to grok this.)
I'm not sure this is the same thing in a country where English is the native language. In your country, a school that teaches every subject in English might be the only way to make sure students are sufficiently immersed in the language. Your teachers are well aware of the limited English possessed by their students and no doubt adjust their instruction accordingly, perhaps even dipping into the native language as needed to communicate difficult ideas. English fluency at graduation is a selling point for those schools, I bet, and they are willing to take a hit to the efficiency of instruction to get it.
Here in the US, there is little worry that students will not be sufficiently immersed in English. The texts I remember I would summarize as saying that bilingual instruction is great, but that in reality most students are left to "sink or swim". The good news is that most students will, eventually, "swim" and become fluent in English whether we help them or not.
The concern here is what they lost while treading water. You see, graduation rates for students new to English here are not so great.
Which takes us back to the issue of whether academic instruction in the native language is important while the English is weak.
There is a good deal of irony in how and what I learned from these required courses. For reasons that melt into partisan politics, my state is one of a handful that specifically forbids (by law!) instruction in any language other than English (with obvious exceptions for classes teaching foreign languages as second languages). My 6 credit hours were required as part of a federal court settlement -- the state was sued by students who felt ill-served by this law -- which amounted to saying, “if you’re going to mandate English-only instruction, all of your teachers better know best practices for teaching English Language Learners (ELLs) using only English.”
But back to sources. I went to a very dusty bookshelf for you...
Alas, the one text I have left from this era is “Echevarria, Vogt, and Short. Making Content Comprehensible for English learners: The SIOP Model 2008.”, which is a book on best practices focused on English-only instruction... but even this still touches on the value of “L1” (the students’ native language) fluency in making sure students are receiving “comprehensible input” -- an important term in this field, as language that does not reach the threshold of comprehensibility for a given student will not help them build language fluency or academic subject knowledge.
Echevarria, Vogt, and Shorts say their model still allows for students to be “given the opportunity to have a concept or assignment explained in their L1 as needed. Significant controversy surrounds the use of L1 for instructional purposes, but we believe the clarification in students’ L1 by a bilingual instructional aide, peer, or through the use of materials written in the students’ L1 provides an important support for the academic learning of those students who are not yet fully proficient in English.” These authors seemed to be glad that, thanks to internet technologies, all classrooms “should have some resources in most of the students’ native languages.”
Another relevant passage:
“In fact, the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth found that academic skills such as reading taught in the first language transfer to the second language.”
Summarizing findings from the National Center for Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence, they listed as a bullet point that “Academic literacy in the native language facilitates the development of academic literacy in English”
I remember stronger endorsements for bilingual instruction in books now lost to me, but even these acknowledged that bilingual instruction generally doesn’t exist for a variety of budgetary and political reasons, so we had better learn to help ELLs get by in an English-only classroom.
Thanks! If I remember correctly, the bilingual schools in my country had a system something like "one hour of math in native language, one hour of math in English". That's different from English-only.
Much like a certain kind of programmer can write FORTRAN code in any language?