We of Speakeasy are not linguists. Nor are we cognitive psychologists, educators, or academics of any kind. Obviously we can’t attempt to get our minds up to speed with the likes of our clients’ or their peers, but our journey began with a training-montage-esque few weeks of increasingly feverish research to understand the research space we were tumbling deeper and deeper into.
Apparently, if you call it “language acquisition” you’re a Chomsky-ite, and if you call it “language learning” you’re anti-Chomsky. Who is Noam Chomsky? I don’t even… here are some resources we found useful besides Wikipedia:
- Computerized Games and Simulations in Computer-Assisted Language Learning: A Meta-Analysis of Research – this was great at giving an overview of what’s popular right now. Most of this research was in how multiplayer games can provide meaningful context for interaction between two groups of speakers of each others’ target languages.
- Will Mobile Learning Change Language Learning? – an interesting take on what mobile learning offers, in particular how the user’s present physical/personal context can enter into the learning equation.
- Serious Games for Second Language Retention – being able to look at an example of an attempt to achieve a very specific language-learning goal was helpful. Seeing their effort to break down the process and the different possible approaches was useful, although ultimately their product didn’t seem to break new ground.
- http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/default.asp – this is a huge gathering-place for independent language learners. The perspectives here on existing language coursers have been invaluable in looking at how real people endeavor to teach themselves language.
We looked at quite a few papers beyond the above, but most of what we found turned out to be of little utility. Most language-learning papers are above our heads (except Reid who is exceptionally tall), and the most recent studies involving symbolic icons and learning/guessability tended towards the field of GUI design. Using a spatially-mapped icon language as a way to help ease new speakers into a target language is, in our understanding, pretty new!