Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and today I wanna talk about something very
important and that is that language earning is not that complicated.
The reason I wanna talk about that is because I was going through my library
here, uh, in the section where I have books on language acquisition, language
learning, many of which I bought 20 years ago when we were getting started with
LingQ, and I was reading up on the subject from attending conferences and so forth.
And I went back through some of these books and I realized just how complicated
the sort of language acquisition academics make the subject of a language journey.
It's really not that complicated.
And so I wanted to go through with you some of the books that I have and some of
the concepts that appear in these books.
You know, learning book, Second Language Acquisition, Rod Ellis.
Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy.
Learning Vocabulary in Another Language.
Vocabulary in Language Teaching, uh, you know, Applied Linguistics,
uh, I mean there's lots.
Okay.
I even have a Swedish one.
I mean, I used to wherever I was, and I would go into a bookstore and, and
see what there was on this subject.
And they make it so complex because what the language acquisition experts,
with the exception of Stephen Krashed, what they try to do is describe...
it's as if language learning is a motion picture, and they're going to
describe it frame by frame, uh, or even not a motion picture, but uh, animated
cartoon where every little step, every little possibility is explained.
Whereas actually it's a very simple, natural phenomenon.
It's the process of acquiring new language habits, largely through a lot
of listening at reading and the kind, for example, uh, I don't wanna pick on
this one because this Rod Ellis Second Language Acquisition is in many ways
the best of all these books because it's short and sweet, not as good as
Krashen, who has a number of very short books explaining language acquisition.
But some of the things he refers to here and I jotted some of them down so that
I could more easily go through them.
So, uh, first of all, he goes to great length to explain that the
order of acquisition depends on the learner's native language.
Again, that's obvious if you don't have articles in your own language,
articles in English or in languages which have articles are going to be
more difficult to learn, uh, if you don't have plurals in your own language,
plurals, which would be absolutely easy for someone who speaks a language that
has plurals, is that's gonna be a lot more difficult to get right each time.
If you're not used to the idea that every plural noun, you know, might
have to add an s or do something that indicates that it's plural.
So it's an obvious thing.
Uh, again, he goes into all the different kinds of context that
influence how a learner learns.
The linguistic context, the situational context, the psycho-linguistic context,
the form function mappings, fossilization, all of these things that affect how the
process whereby a learner learns, but it doesn't influence how the learner learns.
The learner still has to learn the same way through massive input,
through massive listening and reading.
Talks about learner language and the properties of learner language and
how, again, you know, the forms of the kinds of errors that learner makes
are influenced by all of these things.
Um, then he talks about, you know, social distance and he gives an example
of, of a, perhaps I think it was a Japanese person learning English.
The teacher made reference to Bart Simpson of The Simpsons, and she didn't know
what that was, and that then created the social distance for her between the
language she was learning English and you know, not feeling part of that culture.
Well, of course that's always a part of language acquisition.
You're acquiring a language that's initially quite distant, eventually
gets closer as you get closer to the language and as you engage with content,
cultural aspects of that language, it becomes less and less distant.
But along the way, there are going to be things that remind you that you are
trying to get into this other culture.
Talks about different discourse rules that, uh, you know, in American society
if, if someone makes a compliment, then the response is quite a lengthy one.
Oh, you have a nice shirt and you're supposed to, according to him, you're
supposed to say, well, you know, I've gotten, my mother gave it to
me, or some lengthy explanation.
Whereas I'm not sure that's obviously the case.
The danger when you try to make generalizations is, in fact,
very often that's not the case.
And if someone says to me, you've got a nice shirt, I say, thanks.
I don't get into a lengthy explanation of where I got the shirt.
Terms like speech acts and speech events.
Then they get into this whole critical period hypothesis that we are best able
to learn languages when we're young before the age of 10 or 12, which is
true because the brain has not yet coalesced and, and and kind of hardened
if you want around the native language.
And we could just as easily learn any language and later on
it's a little more difficult.
But then again, there's not much we can do with that.
If I'm a 20 year old learning a language, whatever are the conditions that affect
a 20 year old, that's gonna affect me.
It's not that useful to me as a language learner to know that I should have learned
the language, that language at age eight.
Uh, he even goes on in Ellis's book.
He says, you know, integrative motivation.
He says, for example, uh, English Canadians learning French are very
motivated to learn French because they want to integrate into the French society.
Well, that's absolutely not the case.
Most English Canadians learning French are not at all motivated to learn French.
Some are, and those that are, they learn, but others learn it as a
subject uh, that has to be learned just like, uh, is the case I think
with, uh, language learners in many countries, it's a subject they're not
necessarily that interested in learning.
Those that are motivated do learn.
Uh, it talks about negotiating meaning all these terms.
Uh, so, uh, that's Ellis.
So I, I gave him particular, uh, attention here, but you know, again,
I've sort of dogeared some pages.
So here he talks about, Uh, you know, it's important to allow, uh,
students to select books themselves.
Well, yes.
There you go.
That's a good thing to say.
Um, you know, things that affect the ability to learn a word, what makes
it difficult, uh, how it's spelled.
Yes.
If you're learning Spanish and, uh, there's a one-to-one relationship
between how it's spelled and how it's pronounced, that's gonna be a lot
easier than if you're learning English.
Not to mention, uh, Arabic.
Length, longer words are more difficult, you know, four or five chapters and
why it's harder to learn those words.
Uh, all of these things that are relatively obvious.
You know, if learners do not know, or they must discover its meaning
by guessing from their structural knowledge of the language.
Guessing from an L1 cognate, guessing from context.
Well, they don't necessarily have to guess.
I don't guess.
If I'm reading online, I just look it up and, uh, I know full well that looking
it up, I won't remember that word.
How on LingQ, of course, the blue word becomes yellow.
The next time I see it, I'll know that I've seen that word before, but I'll
look it up again and again and again.
And gradually those words become known.
So some of this, uh, material is sort of predates the advent of the internet.
Paul Nation is an expert on language and particularly vocabulary acquisition.
When, uh, so noticing involves decontextualization, decontextualization
occurs when learners give attention to a language item as a part of the language
rather than as part of a sentence, or excuse me, part of a, of a message.
I don't know that I deliberately decontextualize if I see a word in
different context, eventually the sense of that word grows on me.
While listening or reading a learner notices that a word is new or thinks
I've seen that word before, or thinks that word is used differently from
the ways I've seen it used before.
First of all, if you're not on a system like LingQ, you may not even know
that you've seen that word before.
Learners negotiate the meaning of a word with each other.
Well, that's a, again, on the assumption as is often the case with people
who talk about language acquisition.
Um, the assumption is that people are sitting in a classroom.
Creative or generative use, a third major process that may lead to a
word being remembered is generation.
Increasing number of studies that show that generative processing,
uh, is an important factor.
Generative processing occurs when previously met words are subsequently
met or used in ways that differ from the previous meeting with the word.
Yeah.
That's something that occurs naturally as you read more and more.
The more you read, the more you listen.
The more you encounter words in different contexts, the more this kind
of generative processing takes place.
He also recommends spending time on words.
Yeah.
The more time you spend on one word, the less time you have to spend on
acquiring more words and exposing yourself to more of the language.
That again, can be a function of what you like to do and how you like to learn.
Here is again, norberd Schmidt, who is an expert on acquiring vocabulary.
Again, he, the majority of words, do not have a one-to-one
relationship with a single referrent.
Yeah.
Words don't just mean one theme.
Words can mean a variety of things, but here again, a natural process of massive
input, massive reading and listening, encountering words in different contexts
gradually help you sort of fill out the full scope of the meaning of words.
Talks about word associations, that we would learn the word needle,
and then typically associated with thread or pins or sharp or so.
Sure.
These are things that happen naturally.
I'm not sure much is gained by sort of explaining, uh, what does he say here?
Some explicit learning is probably necessary to reach a vocabulary size
threshold that enables incidental learning from reading, uh, uh, my
experience is that for the longest time there continue to be so many
unknown words, that it's unpleasant to rely totally on the ability to infer.
And I prefer, uh, learning on LingQ, looking up every word, putting it in
my database, coming across it again.
And then eventually seeing it become part of my at least passive vocabulary,
which is the first step towards making it part of your active vocabulary.
So I'm not gonna go through all of these.
I've got applied linguistics here.
Uh, you know how languages are learned, language teaching methodology,
but it is full of this effort to complicate something that is
essentially quite straightforward.
And I would refer everyone to Stephen Krashen.
I don't have to agree with everything Stephen Krashen says.
Uh, he obviously is much more expert than I am.
I draw on my own experience.
He draws on research, but essentially, uh, it's a process of, uh, and
I would encourage everyone.
In fact, I will leave a link to Stephen Krashen's website, uh,
the natural learning approach, the um, input hypothesis.
A number of, you know, very clear and simple explanations of how we
learn, which basically comes down to lots of listening and reading.
And when you have acquired a certain vocabulary, uh, then you start
speaking with more and more confidence.
The greater your, uh, comprehension ability, the greater your vocabulary,
the more confident you feel when speaking, and if you are more
confident, you will speak better and everything will gradually improve.
It's that simple.
It's not more complicated than that.
And we like to think that at LingQ we facilitate this process of learning
through massive input by providing sort of training wheels initially with, uh,
easier content like our mini stories where there's a lot of repetition
and then the ability to expand into more and more difficult content,
content that's of greater interest.
As long as you keep doing that, you are going to gradually learn the language.
The emphasis is on the word gradually, and those people who are motivated
enough to learn on their own, uh, and who feel confident enough, which isn't
everyone to go out there and learn on their own and choose content of their
own to listen to and aren't necessarily waiting for a teacher to spoon feed them,
those people are going to learn better.
With or without...
that's not to say that a teacher can't be helpful.
A teacher can be a tremendous source of encouragement and stimulus and advice,
but, uh, there are many things that as learners we can do to supplement and
compliment what the teacher can provide us with, or just to go out and fend
for ourselves and gradually develop.
Uh, you know, an ability and an understanding of languages
that are of interest to us.
So thank you that I just kind of felt that when I was looking through my
library I say, wow, it's that complicated.
I don't think so.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
Bye for now.