It\u2019s incredibly frustrating when you grasp for a word or phrase in your target language but it\u2019s just out of reach. Your teacher won\u2019t help, your classmates look blank, and you\u2019re slowly getting more red in the face as your mind struggles to find those elusive words.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t worry though \u2013 it\u2019s good for you! Researchers at the National Institute of Education of Singapore found that struggling to learn new information leads to better recall later. Traditionally teachers will guide students and support them in their learning. The learning paradox shows that when this support is taken away, students may not be able to come up with the correct solution, but have learned more in the process.<\/p>\n
The apparent struggles of the floundering group have what Kapur calls a \u201chidden efficacy\u201d: they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply their correct solutions. When these students encounter a new problem of the same type on a test, they\u2019re able to transfer the knowledge they\u2019ve gathered more effectively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else\u2019s expertise. (Source: Time<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So what does this mean for language learners? Well, perhaps next time you\u2019re cursing your teacher for setting you some difficult homework, consider the longer term benefits \u2013 they\u2019re probably doing it to help you become more comfortable with your target language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s incredibly frustrating when you grasp for a word or phrase in your target language but it\u2019s just out of reach. Your teacher won\u2019t help, your classmates look blank, and you\u2019re slowly getting more red in the face as your mind struggles to find those elusive words. Don\u2019t worry though \u2013 it\u2019s good for you! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,154],"tags":[40,123,25,996],"class_list":["post-1471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-acquisition","category-research","tag-language-acquisition","tag-language-learning","tag-languages","tag-target-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1473,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471\/revisions\/1473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}