English Script Request

...to begin my presentation this afternoon by talking about what I think is the most important issue in language education -- the most important question. And that is: how do we acquire language? And I'd like to begin this discussion- this presentation with an outrageous statement. In my opinion, we all acquire language the same way. The reason this an outrageous thing to say is that these days in education, we're living in an age of individual variation. We're very concerned about how our students are different, not how our students are the same. Uh, those who've been around in the field for a while remember -- oh, about fifteen twenty years ago, people were very concerned about something called "field dependent learners" and "field independent learners". You give people a certain test and one group gets this treatment and one group gets the other. Then, about fifteen years ago, it was left side of the brain, right side of the brain. Some people are "left hemisphere thinkers" some people are "right hemisphere". Then, about ten years ago, "cognitive style". The "cognitive style" of the home culture differs from the cognitive style of the school culture, we have a clash et cetera. Well, each of the examples I gave you is probably correct. There is individual variation and there is quite a bit of it. Nevertheless, there are some things that we all do the same. Let me give you some examples.

Digestion. We all digest food the same -- no significant individual variation. First you put it in your mouth, then you chew it up, then it goes down your throat, then into your stomach. That's how it's done everywhere. That's how it's done in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa. That's how it's done everywhere in the world. The visual system's the same everywhere. It's always the occipital lobe in the back of the brain. It's never in the side of the brain. It's never in the front of the brain. It's never in the elbow. It's done exactly the same everywhere you go. By the way, I used to use, uh, sex as an example of things everyone does the same. But, some counterexamples have been pointed out to me recently. Actually, I saw this movie, if you really want to know the truth. Anyway, we all acquire language the same way. And rather than just talk about it, I'd like to show you. I'd like to take just a couple of minutes and give you some sample language lessons. I use a language that I'm sure you've heard before and maybe some of you speak. And you can tell me which of these two very brief lessons you like better. Uh, here's lesson number one: ??????? [speaking German]. What do you think? Good lesson so far? Do you think if I kept talking to you like that you'd pick up German? Not very likely. How about if I repeat it? Would that help? Probably not. How about if I said it louder? Would that help? probably not. How about if I said it and you repeated it back? Again, I don't think that would help. How about if I wrote it out for you and you could see it on your television screen? That wouldn't help either. How about if I wrote it out for you and you copied it down? How about if I wrote it out for you and deleted every fifth word and you tried to guess what the word is? the truth is that none of these things- help. None of these things mean anything. And I hope you can see that now. Here's lesson number two -- and for this you have to watch me carefully. ...?????... everyone say "ya". I can hear you. Even though it's the TV audience. ...?????????... and here I'll draw a picture, now. ...???????... If you understood lesson number two, -- not every word, but more or less -- I did everything necessary to teach you German. And now I'm going to share with you the most important thing I have learned about language. Probably the best kept secret in the profession. We acquire language in one way and only one way: when we understand messages. We call this "comprehensible input". We acquire language when we understand what people tell us -- not how they say it, but what they say. Or, when we understand what they- what we read. Comprehensible input, in my opinion, have been the last resort of the language teaching profession. We've tried everything else. We've tried grammar teaching, rules and excersizes, computers, et cetera. But the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand -- comprehensible input. Now, one of the reasons lesson number two is better than lesson number one. Is we have mister Spock to help us out. So, anything that helps make input comprehensible -- pictures, knowledge of the world, realia, et cetera -- helps language acquisition.
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If comprehensible input is true -- what we call "the input hypothesis" is true -- other things follow from it. A very important corollary of the input hypothesis is this -- and this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, certainly came as a surprise to me -- talking is not practicing. Talking is not practicing. What does this mean? It means if you want to improve your Spanish, it will not help you to speak Spanish out loud in the car as you drive to work in the morning. It will not help you to go to the bathroom, close the door, and speak Spanish to the mirror. I used to think those things help, now I think they don't. On the other hand, if we were a German class and we could hang together for a couple of weeks, say, an hour a day of German, and I could keep the input light and lively as in the second example, you'd start to acquire German. It would come on its own and eventually, you'd start to talk. Your speaking ability would emerge gradually. Now, we have a lot of evidence that this is true. And the evidence is in the professional literature and books and journal papers et cetera. And if you're an insomniac, you're welcome to look at all that. But, rather than go through that, I'd like instead, uh, to tell you a story that illustrates the same point. Um, I've used this story for a long time, so those of you who've heard it before -- I've been using this for about fifteen years -- the reason that I keep- stay with it is that it makes the point very well.

And I've decided it's- I've discovered it's just about a universal experience. What is happened to me has certainly happened to you. And bear in mind, if you've heard it before and you're tired of hearing it, think how I feel. My experience took place in 1974, when I was breifly living in exile from California, working at the City University of New York Queens College, as director of English as a Second Language. And like everyone else in New York, we lived in a big apartment building. And the apartment next door to us was owned by a Japanese company. And every year, there'd be a new family in the apartment. And every year, there were the children who couldn't speak English. And there I was, director of English as a Second Language -- I will teach English to these children and brag about it to my friends. So I remember going up to the little girl next door, she was, uh, four years old. Her name was Hitomi. I didn't know about this material on language acquisition then -- nobody did. And I thought then that the way you get people to acquire a language is you get them to practice talking. So, I'd try to get her to talk. I'd say "Hitomi, talk to me. Say 'good morning'. Say 'Hi'". No response. Well, clearly, I decided, I've got to make this more concrete -- "Hitomi, say 'ball'". No response. Well, obviously, I've got to break it down into its component parts. Let's work in initial consonants -- "say 'buh'. Look at my lips". Again, no response. Uh, there was a theory going around then that a lot of people still believe -- that children don't really want to acquire language, you have to, kind of force it out of them. So I tried that -- "I won't give you the ball, until you say 'ball'". That didn't work either. No matter what I said, Hitomi wouldn't speak. She didn't say anything the first week. She didn't say anything the second week. The first month, the second month. Five months until she started to speak. Actually, that's not entirely true. Children during this stage do, uh, pick up certain expressions from the other children in the neighborhood. But it's not real language. Uh, they understand approximately what they mean, it's- again, it's not real language. They have a rough idea what it means. They use it in roughly appropriate situations. Things like, uh, "leave me alone", "get outta here". In fact, one child I knew, the only thing he could say was "I kick your ass". Said it everywhere. Wasn't quite sure what it meant. After about five months, Hitomi started to speak. And several things were interesting about her language. First, it looked a lot like first language acquisition -- the same process our children went through -- one word, two words, gradually getting more complicated. Second, it came quickly. By the time Hitomi and her family went bacck to Japan at the end of the year, her English was closing in on the way the other children in the neighborhood were talking. The question is this: what was going on during those five months? She was listening. She was picking out comprehensible input. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition. Let me repeat that. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition. It was the result of all the comprehensible input she had gotten over those five months. Now, a silent period for a child in a situation like this is not pathological, it's normal. It's what you expect. You'd like to have a silent period, wouldn't you? How would it be if you had to study another language. But you went to a class where you didn't have to say anything? Doesn't that sound wonderful? You can talk all you want. You can raise your hand, you can volunteer. But no one's gonna call on you. No one's gonna put you on the spot. Also, in this perfect class, if the input is incomprehensible, it's the teacher's fault -- not yours. That's how we're doing it now. And the results we're getting aren't a little better than other methods, they're actually much, much better. Uh, before I leave this topic, let me put in a brief commercial message for speaking. I'm not opposed to speaking. I think that when the student's speak, it's fine. But, what counts in speaking is not what you say, but what the other person says to you. In other words, when you get involved in conversation, what counts is the input that you can stimulate from other people, so I'm in favor of the student speaking, but we have to understand, it makes an indirect -- a helpful, but indirect contribution to language acquisition.

Uh. I'd like to discuss one more hypothesis before we move on to literacy, and this is a very important one, called the Affective Filter Hypothesis. Uh, research in language acquisition has concluded that there are several factors that are-- that relate to success in language acquisition and I'm going to list them here on your screen. Uh, one factor is motivation. Students who are more motivated do better in language acquisition. Those of you who have studied know that it's a little more complicated than this, but this is a good approximation. Second, self esteem. Uh, with the dominant concept today in popular psychology. Students with more self esteem, more self confidence, do better in language acquisition. Third, anxiety. And here the correlations are negative. The lower the anxiety, the better the language acquisition. In fact, my hypothesis is for language acquisition to really succeed, anxiety should be zero. This has happened to you. Have you ever been in a situation, speaking a language that you may not speak very well, when the conversation gets so interesting you temporarily forget that you're using another language? If this is happening to you that's when you are acquiring, when your focus is completely on the message, what the other person is saying, and your anxiety is temporarily gone.

Uh, by the way as an important footnote to this... I guess today we say "side bar". As a side bar to all this, uh, I'm not sure that zero anxiety is right for everything. I'm sure it's good for a lot of things, but I'm not quite sure how far to push this. Uh, speaking to you as a college teacher, speaking to you as a parent, I'm not all that free and easy. I think there are certain things in school children absolutely must learn. I think my students at the University of Southern California should suffer. We have hard classes. Tough requirements. You don't do the work, you're out. I finally learned what they tried to teach us in Educational Psychology, the amount of drive or anxiety necessary to accomplish a task depends on the task. Sometimes we call Facilitative Anxiety is okay. I don't believe in torture, but sometimes a little anxiety is okay.

Language acquisition though is different. For language acquisition to succeed, anxiety has to be directed somewhere else not at the language. Frank Smith puts it this way, "For a child to develop literacy, the child has to assume that she's going to be successful." The way that we integrate this into the theory is like this: if the student isn't motivated, if self esteem is low, if anxiety is high, if the student is on the defensive, if the student thinks the language class is a place where his weaknesses will be revealed. He may understand the input, but it won't penetrate. It won't reach those parts of the brain that do language acquisition. A block keeps it out. We call this block the Affective Filter.

Here's how it works, somewhere in the brain, [ name ] tells us, is a Language Acquisition Device. Our job is to get input into the device, so that's input here... Low motivation, low self esteem, high anxiety, the block goes up... the filter goes up... and the input cannot get in. This explains how it can be that we can have two children in the same class, both getting comprehensible input. One makes progress, the other doesn't. One is open to the input, the other is closed.

Let me now try to summarize everything I've said in the last ten/fifteen minutes or so, and I'll summarize it in one sentence and we'll wonder why it took me that long: We acquire language in one way, and only one way, when we get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.