Today I want to talk about the benefits of a non-rules-based program of language
learning and language instruction.
The last video I made, I talked about this book, "The Mind Within
the Net" by Manfred Spitzer, where he talks about how the brain learns.
And I drew some conclusions from that, conclusions as to how the brain
learns, how the brain—based on being bombarded with events, or with
words, or with structures, exposure to the language, input—gradually
the brain develops its own rules about how the language works.
In other words, those rules cannot be instructed.
The rules are developed naturally by the brain. And I talked about
how the hippocampus, which is the short-term and medium-term memory,
tries to get access to as many,
say, events or words or facts or things of that nature that it holds onto
for a short period of time and then gradually pumps it into the cortex.
Now, there are some very important benefits from this non-rules-based
language learning approach.
The first one is
that we shouldn't doubt ourselves.
I talked about how [for] children at play, it's an opportunity for them to experiment
in a relatively safe environment.
There can be no catastrophic event.
It's not like going hunting in the old days with their parents where they might
cause a major catastrophe to happen.
It's safe, experiment, interact with people.
Gradually, through this experience, acquiring knowledge.
So that's how we learn languages.
We learn languages through being exposed, much like the child at play.
In fact, we should be like the child at play.
So we are listening, we are reading, and we are speaking.
And when we are speaking, we shouldn't
doubt ourselves.
We shouldn't try to remember a rule.
"Is this correct?"
We should rely more on the natural process of whatever the cortex or the long-term
acquisition of ability, knowledge, longer- term knowledge, whatever state it is at.
And whether what you retrieve at this time is right or wrong,
none of that should matter.
You should just go with your instinct.
Don't second guess yourself anymore than the child at play is going to
second guess him- or herself.
Just go with it.
I think we can
just rely on the process.
It doesn't really matter if you make a mistake. You aren't going to do better
by trying to refer to what Krashen talks about as the affective filter.
In other words, second guessing yourself based on some rule.
Just rely on whatever comes out. Because it's a gradual process of
learning and you just have to go with whatever you got. And you'll probably
be better that way than if you self-consciously try to refer to a rule.
So don't doubt yourself.
The second thing that I think is very beneficial from this understanding of
how language learning works is that we should focus on being active. In
other words, rather than worrying about what we have achieved in the language.
And I think this message goes as much to the learners who are always hoping that
they would be better than they are, as well as the teachers who want to teach
and
test and show X points out of 10.
The teacher can't teach you the rule.
Testing you on the rule doesn't matter.
You have to just rely on staying so active that there are enough language
events, words, sounds, sentences, exposure to the language coming at
you. And that the hippocampus then, if we take that model, is then passing
on to the longer-term cortex area to develop your skill in the language.
As long as you keep doing that, the more active you are, the more things are being
pushed into your cortex in the sort of longer-term processing area, the better.
So all you need to worry about is not how well you've done on the last test or how
well you're going to do on the next test.
You just have to keep active.
So that simplifies the task at hand.
So if you can go out and find interesting things to do in the language or vary
between interesting but difficult texts and easier texts where there's perhaps
more repetition of familiar words.
You keep doing this kind of stuff, pumping it into your cortex.
Eventually you're going to improve. But you improve slowly.
The third thing that's beneficial about understanding this way of learning
is something that I have observed on many occasions, and that is that if you
have had enough activity in the language, have done enough listening and reading,
have read books and so forth, if you then leave the language for a while, when
you go back to it, because everything is stored in your long-term memory.
All of that stuff is still there somewhere in the cortex.
You may not be able to retrieve it right away, but as you reactivate the
language, you reactivate all of these associations that were part of how you
acquired the words. Associations with
sounds, with context, with similar words or different words, or
whatever those associations were.
There's this network of associations that connect all these words in some way.
And so even if you leave the language, if you've got it to a sufficient
level, you don't have to worry.
And in fact, as I have said, I have often found that when I go back to
a language that I have left, in what I termed a period of "benign neglect"
of course, in the short term, I forget certain words. But in the
long-term, I am better than ever.
So I am better today in even those languages that I speak quite well,
but which I didn't spend much time on because I was learning
new languages. But when I go back to my Japanese, or my Chinese, or my French,
or my Spanish, I'm actually better now than I was before because all of
that activity somehow has improved my ability to retrieve the language,
use the language in ways that I don't fully understand. But I am convinced
if we take the position that we are not going to learn rules and
extrapolate from rules, but instead we're going to expose ourselves to as
much of the language as possible, hopefully in interesting contexts,
but as long as we're exposed all the time and we're not doubting ourselves when we
use the language, we're like the child at play, and we stay as active as we possibly
can, pumping stuff into our cortex,
then after an absence and we go back to that language, we're going to find
that we are at least as good as we ever were, and possibly better.
So there's lots of advantages to taking this non-rules-based
approach to language learning.