Which Sort of Learner Are You?

Did you know that there are different ways of learning? So which suits you best?

29% of people are visual learners: they learn by looking.
34% of people are auditory learners: they learn by listening.
37% of people are kinesthetic learners: they learn by doing.

Visual learners

• Times table: cover over it and picture it.
• Spelling a word: imagine what it looks like.
• Learning a foreign language: looking at a picture next to the word.
• Learning a history fact: watch a video.
• Learning how something works: look at a diagram or a picture.
• Learning a story: imagine the story.
• Learning a new sport: watch a demonstration.
• Learning how to make a cake: look at instructions on the packet or recipe.
• Learning to count in a foreign language: look at cards/posters.
• Learning how the eye works: look at a diagram of the eye.
• Learning how to use a new tool: watch someone else use it.

Auditory learners

• Times table: say it out loud.
• Spelling a word: say each letter out loud.
• Learning a foreign language: repeating it out loud to yourself.
• Learning a history fact: listen to a person on the radio explaining what happened.
• Learning how something works: listen to someone telling you how it works.
• Learning a story: tell someone else the story.
• Learning a new sport: repeat back instructions to the coach.
• Learning how to make a cake: listen to a tape about what to do.
• Learning to count in a foreign language: sing the words.
• Learning how the eye works: listen to someone telling you.
• Learning how to use a new tool: listen to someone telling you.

Kinesthetic learners

• Times table: adding on fingers.
• Spelling a word: write it down.
• Learning a foreign language: writing it out over and over again.
• Learning a history fact: role play - act out what happened.
• Learning how something works: take the object apart and try to put it back together.
• Learning a story: draw pictures/cartoons to tell the story.
• Learning a new sport: do it.
• Learning how to make a cake: try to make it.
• Learning to count in a foreign language: play French bingo.
• Learning how the eye works: make a model.
• Learning how to use a new tool: teach someone else how to use it.

'On task' times

• Adults: 20 to 25 mins with 2 to 5 min breaks between.
• 10 years: 12 mins focus time, then 2 to 5 mins review or play in between.
• 6 years: 6 mins focus time, then 2 to 3 mins review or play in between.

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Self Learning Children in India

In many rural villages in India most children go to school but learn relatively little. Deep education inequalities persist, especially in the quality of education. The 2014 Annual Status of Education Report shows that almost a third of rural children aged six to eight in India cannot even recognise letters yet.

The Hybrid Learning Program was developed by Madhav Chavan and Rukmini Banerji of Pratham, one of India's largest non-profit organisations working in the education sector. Tablets without an internet connection were preloaded with a wide range of locally relevant content and given out in 400 villages with a reasonable number of pupils who could read. Village members were required to do two things - have children who will organise themselves into groups of five, and have an adult responsible for charging the tablet computers every night.

Worried that children would use the tablets for playing and having fun rather than focusing on the preloaded educational content, the team put passwords on the tablets that only allowed access to to the Pratham content. But the team soon discovered that playing and having fun was exactly the point.
The children quickly found a way to hack the system and bypass the passwords and in no time at all over 50% of all the tablets no longer were password protected. Children were doing a wide range of things. They were very interested in Pratham's educational content and they were also busy making their own - videos, songs, downloads perhaps from visitors' phones or computers via file sharing.

Closing the gap in essential academic skills is important but to really leapfrog forward, marginalised children need the opportunities to develop a much broader set of skills, including "learning how to learn". Digital fluency and academic mastery are important, but secondary to the ability to learn new things, use strategies to tackle a new problem, seek help, find solutions. In traditional schools students are so conditioned to have teachers give them the answer that it is a fundamental shift for them to approach learning in this new way. The hardest part of implementing the programme has been training Pratham staff not to give children the answers or fix problems, but to let children figure things out on their own. A mindset shift not only for the children but also the adults.

In the first three months of playing with the tablets there has been, according to the project's monitoring data, an 11% increase in pupils' core academic skills such as reading in children's mother tongue, reading and speaking in English, and science.

Source: Indian children invent their own lessons by Rebecca Winthrop, BBC News website, 16 Nov. 2016 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37618901].

Learning Skills

Research shows that students who immediately tell someone the information that they learn can recall details better and for longer - useful in exam season.

Good Housekeeping, June 2017

For poetry, songs, music, lists of words in another language: It may be better learning from the end, each time finishing with something you know. So learn the last line of a poem first, then last two lines. Split music in phrases and sections for learning. This could also help with gymnastic, ice skating and synchronised swimming routines.

Brainstorming a problem? Language is good for description but bad for perception. To get a new point of view, choose a random word and juxtapose that with the target word or area. Also cultural differences can produce different ways of looking at a situation. Include Plus, Minus and Interesting points, Consequence and Sequel, and the Other Point of View in your review. Remember that Either/Or choices make for 'sharp' decisions.

Edward de Bono: I Am Right, You Are Wrong, Penguin 2009

If a baby is introduced to water before any fear is allowed to develop (easily transferred by a frightened parent), swimming never has to be formally taught, just as babies are not taught to walk.

Zen approach to learning physical skills is that you play better if 'unconscious' of how to play. Archery: relaxation, visualisation of the shot, letting go of oneself. Tennis: beginner watched coach doing 10 forehand strokes, then let body imitate - perfect except that did not move feet - had commented that coach moved feet first and tried to remember that. Can be applied to other physical skills such as golf and skiing.

Ian Wilson: Superself. Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd, 1989

Learning Another Language

Dreaming in Hindi: life in translation by Katherine Russell Rich
Portobello Books, 2010.     ISBN: 978 184627 261 5

L1 = First language           L2 = Second language                     L2WS = Second language writing system

The book chronicles her year of learning Hindi through total immersion study in India and some facts and theories about language learning.

There is a critical period for language acquisition which ends around puberty when brain lateralization is complete. For most right-handed people language systems end up in the left hemisphere. Some experts contend that there is a sequence of cut-off points for different aspects of language. Prosody (intonation) is thought to be the first to ‘close’. Others are phonology (sound patterns), morphology (combination of small sound splices – ‘can’ plus ‘dy’ – into words) and syntax (the ordering of words into sentences. Only one, lexicon (vocabulary) continues after maturation.

Procedural (automatic) knowledge is acquired incidentally and at a young age, e.g. tying shoelaces, walking upstairs, speaking a first language.

Declarative knowledge is what you learn later in life – maths, telephone numbers and PIN numbers, other languages – and is stored diffusely in the brain.

When using another language you use different combinations of brain circuits and draw more on context and gestures processed in the right hemisphere of the brain and less on the limbic system, which deals with emotions, at the base of the brain. For first languages, emotions help language set – e.g. a mother’s approval of infant speech.

An English child of 6 or 7, taken to live in France, will go through a silent period. They won’t use the target language initially but after several months will speak fluently. Adults and teenagers tend to feel they must talk straightaway but listening without speaking is important. In total immersion your first language seems to fall apart while you concentrate on the new language.

Studies have shown that various other skills do not help second language acquisition: poor visuo-spatial skills, a gift for music or intelligence. What does help is motivation, good phonological memory (the capacity to reproduce and retain sounds), a knowledge of other languages and a willingness to play and pretend to be someone else.

Each language is related to its own culture and will not always directly match the first language – some words will be ‘missing’ and others not directly translatable into the first language. In cultures where timekeeping is fluid, words for appointment, minutes and seconds may well be missing.

‘Transfer’ is the way a first language interferes with a second language. One theory argues that a German-English bilingual speaks a German different from a monolingual German speaker and an English different from a monolingual English speaker.

At birth our brains are already tuned to the prosody of L1 and by 6 months our ability to detect another culture’s vowels is waning, though consonants remain clear for a while longer.

There are two kinds of language learners: the ‘i-dotters’ or analyticals who want to know the reasons for each usage and the ‘globals’ who can listen and learn and are intuitive, visually oriented and approach problems spatially.

Most languages have one central vowel, which shapes the face at rest. In English this is the ‘schwa’ sound, while in French it is the ‘Uu’.

The ability to detect and predict patterns is crucial to conversation.

People are slower at reading foreign scripts not only because they are reading in a foreign language but also because of the alphabet or syllabary or ideograms used. The brain has to gauge contextual meaning, calculate the phonemes (sounds) encoded in the script and analyse the lines of print as letters and not random squiggles. Chinese ideograms fit the tonal language of Chinese (tonal variations on a single sound give a number of different meanings) better than Roman script.

Spoken language is a biological specialisation but there is no natural reading zone in the brain, so it is a challenge for brain plasticity and there is no biological cut-off point for reading – people can learn to read at any age – but this does not mean is easy when older.

Languages are not codes but maps of reality. Speakers of each language comprehend the world differently. Within a particular language you can only say things in a certain way. In Spanish you are ‘in’ the bus, while in English you are ’on’ the bus. One study investigated the effect of gender on nouns and found that Spanish speakers described a key (feminine in Spanish) using more feminine adjectives (intricate, shiny) while German speakers, for whom the word key is masculine, used terms like heavy and jagged.

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