Reading & Listening Comprehension Strategy: When to Focus.

And then it's possible to start to feel frustrated because I continue

not understanding this stuff.

Hi, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I want to talk about focus in language learning.

All right?

And the reason I'm doing that is because, recently I've had, sort of, problems...

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So focus.

So I was having trouble with my camera.

All of a sudden it was all out of focus.

So the background was outta focus and even where I was speaking was kind of out

of focus and I couldn't get it to work.

And no matter what I did, I couldn't get the focus sharp

the way it's supposed to be.

Now, fortunately, my son was over and he grabbed the camera and he

identified by deduction that, you know, all of the stuff that I was trying

to change, you know, auto focus this and that, I'd never touched before.

So, maybe Dad, it's not so smart to think that that's gonna solve the problem.

It's something else.

And sure enough, there was a setting that, you know, that you

kind of, either you were in VA for, I guess video or something.

That's where I was.

That's not where I was supposed to be.

I was supposed to be on something else, A+.

So with that, and I haven't checked it, but I'm hoping that this is clearly

in focus, but I thought about the subject of focus in language learning.

When we learn a language, we kind of, and I find that I sort of move from being very

focused on specific details to allowing, you know, the language just to come in me,

into my brain without tremendous focus.

So, for example, I listen to my, uh, you know, Lebanese TV program.

I don't really understand that much of it.

I kind of have understand it.

I'm starting, things are starting to come into focus to the extent that I

can hear clearly where one word, uh, ends and the next word begins, but

I don't necessarily know that word.

But it is sort of an increasing focus that's developing, but it's

developing as I am allowing this stuff to come in somewhat unfocused,

and then I will go in and study that lesson sentence by sentence.

When you're studying sentence by sentence, of course you're very much focused.

And the more focused I am, the more I do the sort of, um, vocabulary

exercises, like the matching pairs or trying to reconstitute the sentence,

which the, the sentence gets scrambled I have to put it back together.

All of this is allowing me to focus in on the language, focusing in on the language

of course, I am not acquiring as many new words because when I'm going through the

whole text, it has a lot of blue words.

I'm running into these yellow words that I've saved before I'm running

into them again, not necessarily remembering, remembering them, but by

running into them again, I am sort of somewhat strengthening my hold on them.

So, you know, I'm sort of pushed back and forth or pulled back and forth.

So when I'm in the sort of unfocused study mode, a lot of stuff is coming in.

It's a little bit fuzzy, uh, gradually getting a little less fuzzy.

It has new words, it has a lot of yellow words that I have still not learned,

but I'm covering a lot of material and then I go and listen to it while I'm

doing the dishes, and I'm also covering that material in a unfocused way.

And then it's possible to start to feel frustrated because I continue

not understanding this stuff.

However, if I then focus in on a particular issue, like a particular

sentence or maybe a particular grammatical issue or, or, or any

particular sort of smaller sub, you know, smaller detail in the language,

I'm always conscious of the fact, yeah but I'm not acquiring new vocabulary.

So I'm pulled one way and then the other, either I, I wanna get exposed

to the language, I wanna learn new words, I want to increase...

I referred the other day to sort of my reserve that our

memory can consist of a reserve.

Things that have come in, that they're in reserve, but we can't yet retrieve them.

Uh, but if we focus on just making sure we can retrieve those, then

we're gonna end up with a much narrower, focused sort of subset.

So I think I often talk about the need to vary what we do in language

learning, and I think to vary between sort of focusing on a small part of the

language, trying to, you know, focus in on a pattern, focus in on vocabulary,

focus in on a particular sentence.

You still have to mix in with that, the sort of background.

So...

and the background is part of it.

You, even if you're very clear, like if I have a clear picture right now on the

camera and I haven't had a look at it, it's okay if the books in the background

are a little fuzzy and, and so I'm focused in the, in the lens, but you also need the

background and, and we also need that sort of building up of that larger, you know,

getting used to the language even though it's still not really very much in focus.

So, uh, I just mentioned this because I was thinking about focusing my camera

and then I thought about, you know, it, it does help me even though it slows me

down to go sentence by sentence and pick through it and work on the words and

reassemble the sentence, which kind of shows me some aspects of grammar because

I have to try to remember or even think through which word follows which word.

And while it's slowing me down I think it is allowing me to focus in better

when I listen to the, the sort of undifferentiated or the, the, the sort

of larger picture where there are many new words or many words that I don't

know, but I, I get the feeling that I'm better able to focus in on these

even because of the fact that I did focus in on sentences for a while.

So I tend to go back and forth on being very focused at times and

then allowing the language to come at me in a sort of unfocused way.

So I don't know whether that's helpful, but I think it's important that whatever

we're doing in the language, we want to feel, at least, I want to feel

that what I'm doing is worthwhile.

It's a worthwhile use of my time.

And so for that reason, I have to remind myself that, yeah, I keep on listening

to the, you know, the whole story.

Uh, the whole television interview, and I keep on not understanding

it, but it doesn't matter because that's building up my ability to see

it more clearly, to focus better.

And on the other hand, when I focus in on a more limited bit of the language,

like a sentence or some aspect of the language, it's slowing me down.

I'm not creating as many new LingQs.

I'm not reading as much.

Uh, but by focusing in on these sort of, these samples of the language,

it is helping me focus again on the broader, uh, sort of range of, of,

of language input that I'm getting.

So I don't know if that's helpful to you.

Uh, it's something that I felt was meaningful to me.

It's a little bit, I should perhaps sit down and think it through and, and do

some more research on it, but I just thought I would share that with you.

So thank you for listening.

Bye for now.