*, or Illusion of frequency - a cognitive distortion in which newly learned information that appears again after a short period of time is perceived as unusually often repeated.
Bugs all around...
The “software” of each of us is stuffed with “bugs” - .
The question arises: how can a person perceive reality without them? Can human consciousness in principle be free from systematic deviations in perception? How would human society and the world change if everyone were free from them?
While there are no answers to these questions, and while none of us is free from them, this “Achilles heel” of human perception is successfully used by marketers, advertisers and other practitioners. . They have succeeded in creating manipulative techniques by successfully exploiting our cognitive distortions to, for example, achieve the commercial goals of corporations.
The author found a working application of cognitive distortions in another area - teaching foreign languages.
Psychological inertia of the native language in the study of a foreign language
As a specialist working with people's minds, the author knows very well how painful and ineffective the fight against the psychological inertia of the native language when learning English.
Cognitive science has revealed that even if a person is perfectly aware of the presence of cognitive distortions, this knowledge in no way gives a person immunity from falling into them. In language teaching, the goal is to practice the language as a tool, not to combat the inevitable cognitive distortions that prevent this goal from being achieved. At the same time, encounters with cognitive distortions in the process of mastering a foreign language are inevitable.
Unfortunately, the popular technologies and methods of teaching foreign languages that exist today at a systematic level do not take into account the natural resistance of the psyche to the integration of language structures that are incomprehensible to it, and, in fact, they are rather long-term projects for breaking through closed doors with their foreheads than a pleasant process of mastering important skills, accompanied by the pleasure of feeling the growth of skill and profitability of intellectual, time and financial investments.
In the process of pedagogical practice, the author learned one truth: to deal with distortions of perception when teaching a language is just as unproductive as to deal with one's own Shadows according to Jung, which can be overcome only by identifying them, realizing and accepting them in oneself. When the integration of the repressed Shadow back into the personality takes place, this shadow turns into a powerful resource.
From this conclusion, the idea was born to “saddle” the inertia of cognitive distortions, to play along with consciousness in a controlled way so that the distortions help, and not hinder, the rapid assimilation of the material.
Method 12 was born (link in profile) - a heuristic way of "loading" the system of "tenses" of English grammar. The process in which some of our cognitive distortions, usually obstacles, act as our allies, providing, paradoxically, the awareness and comfort of the learning process, significant savings in time and money - in general, a fairly simple, algorithmic, and entertaining shortcut to goals.
“Whoever hinders us will help us!”
The system of mastering the twelve English types of temporary forms Method 12 is based on the principle of aikido: “He who hinders us will help us!”
Indeed, why invest in a grueling fight against cognitive distortions if they can be used as powerful allies, on whose back it is much easier to triumphantly enter a new skill?
What is this , what help us master the material in the space of Method 12, and with which traditional approaches to teaching interact so irrationally?
To begin with, with any traditional approach to language acquisition, it outside study as an existing phenomenon. The prospect of further integration of this alien system into the arsenal of one's own consciousness seems to the trainee as unsteady as taking a fortress wall in a jump. There is me, and there is an English giant, and I need to eat and digest this elephant, cutting off small pieces from it for a long, long time.
Guarding the moment when this eaten elephant becomes an integrated part of your consciousness, there is a cognitive distortion, denoted as “” (which is associated with “”). Method 12 takes into account this phenomenon of the psyche, as well as a similar “” (which is an objective property of the psyche, and not a cognitive distortion), building an educational space on their inertia.
Let's see how Method 12 interacts with each of them.
Consider how Method 12 interacts with each of them and how traditional approaches:
| Effect IKEA, description | The 12 method | Trad. teaching methods |
|---|---|---|
| The tendency of people to appreciate more that which they themselves took part in creating. Due to the amount of effort put into a project, people often tend to keep investing in obviously failed projects. | As part of the Method, 12 people independently construct a system of English times, answering the teacher's questions, offered in a certain sequence. Students see how many steps are left before the completion of the structure, measure the return on their investments. When the design is complete, they stop investing in building the design and realize that the stage of improving design ownership has begun. | The trainee does not create anything himself, only tries to blindly board some external matter that is abstract for him. As a rule, people try to understand the system of times for years and remain dissatisfied with their understanding and possession of this matter. Students either retreat for a while, later, under the pressure of objective necessity, return to attempts to master the material; or stubbornly continue to invest in something that they are doing very badly without realizing. |
| Generation effect, or manifestation, description | The 12 method | Trad. teaching methods |
|---|---|---|
| The best mastery of the material is carried out by a person in the conditions of its independent generation or completion by the person himself, than with a simple reading. It manifests itself due to a deeper processing of the completed information, which carries more semantic load. It involves the establishment of a larger number of associative links, which increases the number of "access routes" to the generated information, in contrast to a simple "reading". | Within the framework of the Method 12, people, answering sequential questions of a cognitive nature, independently generate a system, calling out from their consciousness the already familiar and understandable elements of their native language, recombining them into another system of the language being studied. Thus, the new system is the creation of the student, and not an external object for study. The identity of the manifested system to the system of English “tenses” is the responsibility of the teacher and developer, not the student | The trainee does not create anything himself, only tries to blindly study some abstract external matter unfamiliar to him, using relatively unsystematic rules and exercises developed by third parties. |
These two phenomena, one of which is cognitive distortion, are the pillars on which two of the four (symmetrical first and third) stages of Method 12 are built, where the construct of the system of English tense forms is revealed.
The triumph of the owl and the globe
Further, Method 12 successfully overcomes the age-old problem of students “pulling a Russian owl onto an English globe”, about which the author already earlier.
It seems that this cognitive distortion is a derivative of the distortions “",""And"". They are united by the tendency of our psyche to seek or interpret new information in such a way that it fits into the already existing paradigm in consciousness. In the case of learning English, this is the phenomenon of a persistent search for Russian cognitive logic in a foreign language, which, of course, is almost absent there in the desired form.
Instead of arguing with a powerful force that, against our will, begins to “pull” new material that is outside the paradigm of the native Russian language onto this very paradigm, instead of driving the nails of the rules into this spontaneous process and clicking the whip of pulling back and correction of endless errors in speech and exercises, we, like a wise psychiatrist, affectionately agree with the recalcitrant consciousness. “Yes, dear. Do you want it like that? Of course, my good, let it be as you wish.” And we build the right direction for the elements.
The consoled consciousness ceases to stress and panic from the fact that it is not possible to “shove the unpushable”. And in the meantime, we tenderly offer him a display of the system of species-temporal forms, encoded into the system of consciousness familiar to him, "peaceful" realities and symbols - "facts", "processes", "deadlines", "perfect facts", etc. . This auxiliary symbolic construction is arranged in such a way that it is identical to the system of twelve English tenses of the active voice. In a few hours of training, the mind smoothly imposes an auxiliary 3D structure on the English Tenses system, and naturally integrates the once hated and incomprehensible Present Perfect Simple and Future Perfect Progressive. An analogy can be drawn with the situation when a medicine needs to be delivered to the blood of a sick animal. The beast will refuse to eat the pill in its pure form, and instead of wasting time on its resistance and aggression, the owner simply mixes the pill into the treat. Voila.
As a result, we allowed the consciousness to “stretch” at our pleasure, but slightly corrected this process: “owl” became English, and “globe” became Russian. That is, the consciousness, under the strict guidance of the teacher, stopped looking for Russian cognitive logic in English, but, on the contrary, found elements of the cognitive logic of English in Russian and built these common elements for both languages in understandable and familiar categories into a model of a system identical to the system of types of temporal forms of English language. We painlessly and comfortably overcame the resistance of consciousness, evaded the fruitless struggle with it, using the mechanisms of the aforementioned cognitive distortions in favor of a better and deeper internalization of the skill.
Moreover, when developing the internal terminology of Method 12, we use natural inertia и , conditionally encoding some of the most difficult cognitive constructions for Russian-language perception with common folk phrases, such as: “whoever gets up first gets slippers”, “I walked, walked, walked, found a pie, sat down, ate, went further”, “scissors”, “ pins”, “segments”. Now that we have such capacious memes in our arsenal, we have mercifully unloaded our consciousness: now, in order to build the formidable Past Perfect into our Russian-language paradigm, we do not need furious definitions like “an action completed prior to some past point of time specified or implied, formed in English by had and the past participle”. It is enough to hint with a conspiratorial look: “whose slippers”?
Doesn't sound scientific, I agree. But without cognitive distortions and reduced to a logical system, simple and reliable, like a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Taken out of the context of the built system, this “pragmaterminology” loses all meaning.
It is worth mentioning that the course is built cyclically, in the best traditions и . The material of the first stage is processed on a new, deeper, turn on the third, the second stage is mirrored to the “enriched” fourth. And then - the sky is the limit ... A strong "skeleton" of English grammar is implanted in the student's head. Further, you can build up relief “muscles” on it and polish other linguistic beauty as much as the student wants and needs.
The sinister sin of the teacher
We thought a lot about the students. And the teacher? He is also a man with his distortions. What does the teacher overcome in himself, teaching according to Method 12? Perceptual distortion with a sinister name “”: “one of the cognitive distortions in human thinking, which is that it is extremely difficult for more informed people to consider any problem from the point of view of less informed people.” Having such a transparent technology at work, the teacher has no chance to unwittingly confuse the student's head. It is likely that when teaching according to Method 12, as in that joke, “while I was explaining, I understood it myself,” the teacher, explaining the material, can sometimes see in it something that he had not seen before.
I would like to know what difficulties of perception faced in the study of languages by those who have read this text. And a big request to those who do not have cognitive distortions - if possible, do not throw minus stones into the Method. The author tried.
Source: habr.com