Who Learns Fastest?
1/11/2020
What Accounts for Acquisition Speed in Learners? An alternate title for this blog might well be, “Why is my husband acquiring Chinese four times faster than I am?” No one knows why some people acquire languages faster than others. Studies would be problematic, unless a hundred or a thousand people all lived together and documented their activities for anywhere from a year to four or ten years. Even then, one would have to control for many variables, among them language aptitude, working memory, prior languages learned, gender, age, language being studied, and language being acquired. Those who teach with Comprehensible Input methods have demonstrated for three decades now that skilled teachers who meet regularly with students can bring their classes to levels they had not been able to reach with traditional methods. Here is a definition problem. What does “skilled” mean, and what are “traditional methods”? And who exactly is measuring? Aspects affecting rate of acquisition, including socioeconomic level, age, class size, class frequency, teacher preparation, access to resources, and others, vary in classrooms across the US. However, three areas have been studied more than others: working memory, motivation, and language aptitude, Students cannot control their processing speed. If they are fast processors, they can typically understand a phrase faster than others at their level. If their working memory can store more information than others can, they will be able to hold phrases from a new language in their head longer, process them, and then respond to them more dependably. It would seem that having a better working memory would result in being able to acquire language faster. Strangely, there is no proof that having better working memory improves speed in acquisition. Motivation similarly does not have a clear effect on the speed of language acquisition. And as it turns out, students who have stronger language aptitude do have better results in language learning, but only for that language as it applies to classroom talk and grades. The improved rate does not hold up outside the classroom. If you’d like to hear about these differences from linguist Bill VanPatten, go to this link for the Talkin’ L2 with BVP podcast and listen from minute 9:48 through 21:57. (You can move the time control to the first point.) The variable that students can control is the amount--and kind--of input they get in the language. As readers know, this teacher is focused on providing input that students understand. Students who want to acquire a language can search for language at their level. But to speed up language acquisition, there has to be more comprehended input in the same period. So to go back to the alternate title, here is a story. A language teacher and her husband begin taking Chinese lessons together. The language teacher speaks three languages, and her husband speaks seven or eight. When she mentions that he seems to drink up languages, friends nod knowingly, saying, “He’s got that musician’s ear.” (They forget that the teacher is also a musician.) She adds that he began life speaking Japanese, added English, then Italian, later German, French, and Spanish. On a trip to Russia, he magically began speaking Russian, and whenever the two were visiting the teacher’s relatives in Holland, he was quickly able to speak Dutch -- her first language -- better than she. The teacher expects that her husband will acquire Chinese faster than she will. And by the third lesson, taught by a highly skilled teacher through Comprehensible Input methods, she finds that she was right. He answers the Chinese teacher in full sentences. He answers questions faster than his wife can comprehend them. But then the teacher realizes that it isn’t just the faster processing speed, the number of other languages, the fact that the husband walks around all day babbling to the dog, the washing machine, and the kitchen in Chinese. It is also the input. He has been getting himself hours of daily input. He watches children’s Chinese lessons on TV and his iPad. He listens to the videos of the Chinese lessons and the extra resource lessons the Chinese teacher has provided. He goes to sleep listening to podcasts about and in the Chinese language. Where she has spent up to (but not always) six hours a week, he has spent at least four hours a day -- that’s about as much as a Chinese high school student gets in a week, if you consider typical public school interruptions -- for three weeks now. That’s 84 hours of input, nearly half a year’s worth of classroom hours. She has spent 18 hours getting input. Comprehensible input is critical. But the amount of comprehensible input also matters. What does this mean for students? It means that they are going to acquire more during class if everyone is focused, allowing the language to flow (this also requires the teacher to speak so that they understand). They will acquire faster if they listen to classroom songs and read texts they understand on their own time. Students will acquire (any language) faster if they are encouraged and motivated to spend more time using materials that give them comprehensible input. The teacher’s job is to provide them with input and resources. The students are in charge of their own acquisition after that. This teacher is going to make sure that she starts getting more comprehensible Chinese in her day. She wants to be ready to talk with the teachers she meets in China next summer. In Chinese! Comments are closed.
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Specialist & Enrichment Teachers Archives
February 2021
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