Studies

I think I can safely say that linguists make terrible scientists. Also, on the other hand, scientists make terrible linguists.

“How dare you!” I hear you cry, “Besides, you have shown your ignorance, for linguistics is a form of science!”

Whatever. You try reading a few dozen 'scientific studies' conducted on language classes and see if tell me that with a straight face. That's what I say.

For some reason, the linguists I've read can't seem to bring themselves to create a study that isn't completely riddled with holes. Blind Freddy* could see that the methodology is unsound - or, at worst, completely ridiculous - the numbers involved are not statistically significant, the data collected is barely qualitative and hardly quantitative and the controls are almost entirely uncontrolled. I've yet to read a study that doesn't qualify itself in its own conclusions by saying something like “this study doesn't really show anything conclusively, so more people should study this stuff and try to avoid the following sixteen mistakes we think we made...”

On top of that, the closer the researchers come to trying to make a proper, scientific, controlled study, the worse it is for the students involved in the darn thing.

Half the studies I read involved exposing language learners to completely made up words just so the researchers could make sure they weren't learning this vocabulary through some other means. Sure, it means you have a better understanding of the efficacy of that method of vocabulary acquisition (assuming the rest of the study isn't completely daft)... But what about the poor students who have now wasted valuable time learning words that don't exist? These words have been learnt and associated with meanings. They are now sitting in the students' synapses, ready to be pulled out and used “correctly” in term papers and job interviews.

As someone who often finds herself accidentally pulling out an Indonesian or French word when trying to remember a German or Estonian one, I can assure you that words previously learnt do stick around in the brain and reassert themselves at inopportune moments. And now these “scientists” have essentially graffitied the brains of well-intentioned language learners. It's negligent, from a language teaching perspective.

It's almost like those “scientists” who genetically modified a mouse to grow a human ear on it's back. Sure, the results are interesting, but the treatment of the subject boarders on the unethical.

Stop it. Stick with anecdotal evidence. It usually filters out the good from the bad over time.



*One day I'd like to meet Blind Freddy. He seems to be a very observant fellow, and would probably be an interesting conversation partner.