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18 March 2005: Grammar Schmammar (3 of 4)
Of course, the point that I am trying to make in both cases is that learning happens through experience. Riding a bike, like speaking or writing, is a skill that is acquired through a complex process of watching, listening, practicing, failing, adjusting, trying again, and experiencing some amount of success.
Interestingly enough, the "experiencing some amount of success" is really truly necessary to a student's experience of learning.
To continue the metaphor, what if a parent did not respond when a child did not produce grammatically correct language? What if you consistently fell off the bike without travelling even a few inches? What if everything you ever wrote was corrected for grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors? (See 13 October 2004.)
I would predict, in every case, it would not take very long before the learner gave up on learning, because when you discover that something is ineffective, you stop using it.
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