Transcription
Most students still make the same mistakes even though they know the rule. Obviously, there are commercial programs now. Unfortunately, most of the commercial programs are not very good. You should be focusing on acquisition.
Dr. Jeff McQuillin is an expert in second language acquisition, which is the process by which we learn languages. Now, he's got a PhD in Applied Linguistics and was a university professor for many years. Dr. McQuillin has also got decades of experience in understanding how it is that we learn languages, which is going to be so useful for anyone wanting to learn a new language.
At the minute, Dr. McQuillin has published numerous articles related to language learning and now runs the ESL podcast for English language learners. He also has a blog at the Backseat Linguist. In this interview, Jeff reveals how it is that we learn languages according to the research, the big mistakes that people make when it comes to learning grammar and vocabulary, and also his advice for language learners. Enjoy!
Jeff, how is it that adults learn new languages? Well, adults learn new languages the same way that children do. Children learn new languages the same way that we all learn the language that we speak today, which is by understanding messages.
That seems a little cryptic, so let me sort of break that down a little. There are actually two ways that your brain stores language, if you will. The first way is what we call learning. Learning is a conscious knowledge of language; it's the knowledge of rules, like "I before E except after C."
In linguistics, we usually try to distinguish, or at least some of us try to distinguish, between what's learning and what's called acquisition. Learning is conscious; acquisition is subconscious or unconscious. It's the knowledge that you have in your brain even if you don't know it's there. It's the knowledge that we tend to use most of the time during communication.
Now the question is, which of these is more important? Which of these should we be focused on? Should we be focused on learning, or should we be focused on acquisition? The answer, I think, as I've already tipped, is you should be focusing on acquisition.
Unconscious or subconscious knowledge of the language, your feel for the language, the language that you know without even having to think about it. How do we get there? Well, to get learning, everyone knows how to get learning. You pick up a book, you open it, and you study the rules, or you make yourself your flashcards, or whatever it happens to be.
Acquisition comes from understanding messages. The brain acquires language when it can understand what is being communicated to it. Let's take an example. Let's say that you're learning Spanish. You're going to have to find a situation where the language is presented to you in such a way that it's comprehensible, that it's understandable.
For example, if I started speaking in Spanish: "Estoo Doos see Doos." There are no rules there; there's no memorization. All you had to do was watch me and understand the language. If you understood it, you started to acquire a little bit of Spanish in that 20 seconds that I was speaking.
What happens is you take what you know and you leverage that to what you don't. The language that you already understand or the visual language that you all understand, because you understand the meaning of me holding up my hands and talking about my hands. You take that knowledge and you apply it to what you don't know, and that's how the brain understands things.
So, an adult independent learner, where do they start? If they wanted to go, "Alright, well I've heard of this acquisition idea; that sounds fantastic. Where do they start?" Because obviously, there isn't necessarily going to be a teacher there who's willing to go through the acquisition process and say, "L man," or whatever it is.
Where would you think someone should start on that sort of method? What I tell people is, well, first of all, most people are trying to learn languages that are popular. They're trying to learn French or Spanish or Chinese. The reality is, fortunately, there are resources out there. There are YouTube videos, people like yourself who talk about how to acquire languages.
Obviously, there are commercial programs now. Unfortunately, most of the commercial programs are not very good. They tend to focus on short little pieces of language that you try to memorize rather than providing you with the kind of rich, comprehensible language that I demonstrated with my little mono lesson.
You should be looking for a teacher or a method or materials that, number one, you can understand, that give you tools to understand the language other than just translating it. Okay, there's nothing wrong with translation; there's nothing wrong with using the first language to try to acquire a second language.
But if most of the time you're just looking at translations of words, that's not a very effective way. You want something that is mostly presented in the language that you're trying to acquire. You would want to start with materials that present visually information to you that will help you understand what the person is saying or what you're reading.
So that would be pictures, visuals, someone who is speaking slowly and clearly. That seems sort of trivial, right? But it's actually a really important thing. I tell people to look for a teacher that understands the importance of visuals, that speaks slowly, that speaks clearly, that presents interesting stories.
A woman by the name of Beno Mason in Japan has developed this story listening approach. She and teachers who follow her method stand in front of a blackboard or have visuals, and they explain a simple story in the context of what we've just said about this kind of implicit learning and this acquisition.
How does grammar fit into all of that? By grammar, people often mean syntax, right? The order of words, the way that sentences are constructed. When people talk about grammar, usually they mean conscious study of language.
We go back to the distinction I made earlier, which is the difference between learning (conscious knowledge) and acquisition (unconscious knowledge). Yes, you can study syntax, and yes, you will learn certain rules of syntax. The problem here is, can you actually use it when you need it?
The rule books of grammar only capture a small portion of what, in fact, is our entire very complicated syntactical system. But even more importantly, let's say you're really bright and you memorize all those rules. That's still not good enough because you also have to have time to use the rule.
If you're in a conversation, or even if you're reading a book, to stop and say, "Now wait a minute, is that present progressive, past progressive? Do I use the imperfect here or the preterite?" As human beings, our natural tendency is to focus on meaning. We're not so interested in how that message is construed.
The brain doesn't linguistically multitask; it's either focusing on meaning or it's focusing on form. It can switch back quickly, but it can't do both. If you try to focus on what linguists call "focus on form," how something is being communicated, you're not focusing on meaning.
The brain just naturally wants to focus on meaning. For the most part, when people talk about studying grammar, they're talking about trying to memorize rules and distinctions. Here are the imperfect, here are the irregular verbs, and the preterite of certain verbs in Spanish. That's all a waste of time.
You need to focus. All of that will come to you. That, by the way, brings up an important point that some people may object to. They say, "Well, I can learn things, and then later it seems that I've acquired it, so the learning seems to become acquisition."
That's not what we think happens. In other words, just because you've studied something consciously and you really know those rules, does it mean it's going to enter into your acquired system? Is there any benefit from actually studying the rules explicitly in terms of being able to monitor my own speech when I'm speaking Spanish, for example?
Is there much benefit in that, or should students just focus on acquisition and wait until they naturally acquire the rule without having to explicitly think about it? The latter, definitely. I don't think there's much benefit in attempting to monitor, just because most people are not very good monitors.
They aren't able to bring up that explicit knowledge; they don't have the time. Take the example of writing. Okay, you would think that writing would be the ideal place that you could "quote unquote" use the term monitor, right? The notion that you can take a rule and you can apply it right at the right place and you can fix just before you're about to say something or before you're about to write something.
You can say, "Wait a minute, is that past? Oh, that's present." Boom! I've used my conscious knowledge in writing. When we've studied writing and explicit instruction, you teach someone the grammar rules, blah blah, and then you give them something to write.
Then you say, "Okay, blah blah blah, go ahead and write that." Most students still make the same mistakes even though they know the rule. Even when you have time and you know the rule, the hardest one to meet is actually focusing on form.
That's why proofreading is such a difficult thing for most people. You write something, you think it's perfect, you give it to somebody else, and they say, "Oops, 17 errors in here, spelling errors or whatever it is." Right? That's before spell check. But you know what I'm talking about.
Proofing is so difficult because we focus on meaning. So don't spend your time trying to become a good monitor. Spend your time trying to be a good acquirer and get lots of comprehensible input.
If my brain is first focusing on meaning, so someone's talking to me in, let's say, Spanish, I am listening to what they're saying, and my brain is automatically, implicitly, without me thinking about it, focusing on meaning.
First of all, if I'm then wanting to think about trying to acquire those grammar rules or acquire grammar, whether we say rules or whatever, and I'm using content, if I take it in a slightly different context, if I'm using content, what level should I ideally want to understand so that I'm not just focusing on the meaning but actually I've also got enough capacity to acquire the form?
So that I can get that. Well, do I have to have a higher level of comprehension of the meaning of things, or will that just happen implicitly? There's just no way for you to know what the current state of your level of acquisition is.
There is a way of knowing how much you can understand now. Everybody has a different level of comfort, but for me, if I understand 95% of what I'm reading or listening to, then I'm confident that my acquisition system, my brain, is going to be able to pick up whatever grammar rules I have in acquisition.
I don't know what those grammar rules are; I certainly wouldn't try to focus on certain grammar rules. So don't worry about, in other words, where you are in that order, whether you've acquired this rule or that rule. Simply get lots of good comprehensible messages that you can mostly understand.
Now, if you're reading or listening to something that you understand 100%, well, you still may be acquiring, even though you understand 100% of the vocabulary. There still may be grammatical aspects that you're acquiring or strengthening in your acquisition system.
So I wouldn't say don't do that, but generally speaking, as you're going through, you want to find, you want to listen and read things that you at least contain some information about the language that you don't know. But I wouldn't worry too much about that.
You definitely need to keep pushing yourself, but for most people, that's sort of a natural process. As their language fluency improves, they start reading things that are closer to native language, and their language develops as a consequence of that.
Interesting. Alright, well, that's sort of reassuring, and that as learners, we don't have to worry about it. You could just focus on the brain; it will sort it out for you. Well, that's good.
Now onto one of potentially one of your favorite topics, I don't know if it is or not: vocabulary. Yes, as learners, we need a lot of words if we're going to reach any real level in a language. What's sort of the most effective way for us to improve our vocabulary?
The interest of people in vocabulary is a good one; it's an understandable one. Vocabulary, you will not be surprised to learn, is acquired the exact same way that everything else is acquired in a language, which is through comprehensible messages, through understanding the language that you read and listen to.
The most efficient way to do this, as I've already indicated, I think in the previous question, is to make sure that you're understanding messages that are at a high level of comprehension. You already understand 90%, 95% of the words, or even 98% of the words, and you're able to use that to figure out the few words that you don't understand.
Now, sometimes when I say, "Well, 98%," you think, "Well, that's really high." But what we do know is that as that percentage starts dropping, as you understand only 80% or 70%, you're going to struggle incredibly with the language. So much so that you're not going to have enough knowledge to understand the things you don't know.
So I always push people to really find things that they're comfortable with, that they can read or listen to comfortably enough so that the brain has the opportunity to pick out those little words that they don't know.
Let me just say one more thing about vocabulary acquisition. Well, I might say a lot more than that. Vocabulary is acquired incidentally and incrementally. The two I's. Okay? We acquire vocabulary incidentally. By that, I mean we acquire vocabulary when we're not worried about acquiring vocabulary.
We acquire vocabulary as we're reading and understanding messages. Nobody picks up a book and says, "I'm going to acquire some more French vocabulary today!" Yay! No, you pick up a book and say, "I want to read this story," or "I want to understand this topic." That's why you read; you're focused on meaning.
Vocabulary acquisition is incidental; that is to say, it's an extra benefit. You pick those words up unconsciously as you're going along. The second big point about vocabulary acquisition, and this is one that people really have to understand, the one that people I think get the most in trouble with, is vocabulary is acquired incrementally.
That means you pick up a little bit of the meaning typically each time you see it. There were a series of studies done in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and that continued to be done. But the most important ones were done by a guy by the name of Bill Nagy, who was at the University of Illinois at the time in the 1980s.
What Nagy discovered is that every time you see a word that you've never seen before, usually you pick up a sense of what that word is. Maybe it's just whether it's a noun or a verb, maybe it's a good thing or a bad thing based on the other context in the story or what you're reading or what you're listening to.
But each time you see that new word in a different context, you're going to pick up 10%, 15% more. That all adds up so that every time you see those words, you're picking up that incremental knowledge until such a point where all of a sudden you know the word unconsciously, and you don't know how you learned it.
I should say acquired it. The good thing is the words that you really need to know, by definition, you'll see them more often. Don't worry about that one rare word; it's not that important. The important thing is you've picked up a little bit of knowledge even without realizing it, and it's that incremental knowledge that you're picking up as you're reading and listening that drives your language acquisition in terms of vocabulary acquisition.
That's where we get our knowledge, and it's hard because you have to trust your brain. You have to trust your brain that it's going to pick out the meanings and it's going to put it in your unconscious system. So relax; it's happening as long as you're getting comprehensible messages.
So for those words, then I have to see them in context. From what you're saying, and then that way I'll get a percentage, whatever that percentage is. It doesn't really matter; I'm getting a little bit of that word each time.
What about things like, you know, if I think of pretty much any beginner's textbook, there'll be the first opening dialogues and there'll be a list of vocabulary down the side and the translation for those words. If I try and consciously remember that vocabulary and then the translation that is at least the most accurate translation that we can get at the time, how useful is that sort of thing?
Because that's the sort of thing that people will then immediately go and say, "Pop on a flashcard," without any context around it. And then quite quickly, then you'll just be remembering individual words. How useful is that? It's useful as you're reading the dialogue through, perhaps, because now you can kind of understand it.
But it's generally speaking not very useful after that. If memorizing vocabulary worked, you would be able to take a word, put it on your flashcard, memorize it, and then the next time you see it, boom! You'll be able to use it.
Let's say you teach kids 10 words, and you have them memorize those words, and then you give them something to read, a reading passage or something in a book that contains those 10 words. The theory is, because they memorized those words, they'll be able to understand that reading better.
The reality is they don't. We know from studies with children and adults in first language and second language studies done from the mid-1970s up to the present day that teaching vocabulary explicitly or trying to memorize words explicitly leads to a kind of knowledge.
As one person put it to me, it's the kind of knowledge that you can't use. It's knowledge that doesn't actually improve your comprehension. Our learned knowledge is very fragile; unconscious knowledge acquisition is there. It tends to be much more permanent.
So trying to memorize words produces a very shallow effect, what I call a shallow effect. Now researchers understand that, and that's why in the 1980s, vocabulary instruction shifted from this sort of memorized words to what's called rich or deep instruction.
But the problem with that is that also takes a lot of time, and so it's not a very efficient use of your time. The other thing is that if you look on the internet and you watch other videos, and God knows why you would want to—I mean, you've got Matt here, listen to what he's saying—but let's say you go out and you see somebody say, "Well, you guys should really be trying to memorize lists of vocabulary," and they give you a program, Anki or Duolingo or whatever it is, and they say, "Look, it's much faster; you're going to memorize all these words."
That is not, in fact, what the research shows. What the research shows is that in order to memorize a large group of words, you've got to spend so much time reviewing those words that if you had just read and listened with the time that you've spent memorizing those words, you would have acquired more vocabulary.
The time efficiency argument is so against memorization and flashcards; it's ridiculous. Other people who advocate flashcards, they're not looking at the research correctly. They're only looking at a study and saying, "Hey, look, this group memorized 12 words in X number of minutes. Wow!"
But what they don't realize is that the next week they would have forgotten all 12 of those words. Or if they had spent time memorizing it over a period of, say, months, that time is actually—if you took that time and you instead had just been listening and reading the comprehensible input—you would have acquired even more words.
If you spend your time on flashcards, all you're going to get is vocabulary. Whereas if you spend your time reading and listening, you're going to get vocabulary, you're going to get syntax, you're going to get morphology, you're going to get knowledge, you're going to get all the other aspects of language.
Whereas flashcards give you one aspect of language. Yeah, fantastic! And that's one of those things. It's not just the opportunity cost in terms of time spent, but it's also just—it's objectively more enjoyable to sit down and follow a story than it is to memorize flashcards.
Flashcards only work in theory if you do them regularly over a long period of time, which is correct. Having a reading habit, which you could get through many more books and have a fantastic time while you're doing it, obviously providing you can find things at the right level.
And that's the thing, I think certainly for me, it's just finding a way to get an enjoyable habit. That's how you're going to pick up the language. Rather than—it shouldn't be something you have to force yourself to do.
Because the sheer number of hours it takes to acquire a language, you're never going to get there if you're not enjoying what you're doing. It's just not going to work, is it?
For learners, if you could give them one piece of advice in terms of how to improve their language learning or learn in a way that, like we say, will keep it sustainable and hopefully enjoyable but also effective, what would you advise people?
The one thing that I think is most important, especially for beginning language learners, like really all of us, is lower your expectations. And the reason I say that is that's such important advice for anyone trying to learn something new, especially as an adult.
Because adults are very hard on themselves. They think that they should be going faster than, in fact, they can. For example, a lot of people say, "Well, I wish I started learning Spanish when I was 5 years old or 3 years old. Kids pick up language so quickly." Nonsense! That's a complete myth.
Children do not acquire language quickly. What happens instead is that our perception for children is different than our perception or expectations for ourselves as adults. So we think that kids are picking up language quickly, but in fact, when you go back and you study kids' acquisition, it's quite slow and labored.
Language acquisition takes time. If you put expectations on yourself that are unreasonable, you're going to get discouraged, and you will stop. So I think the average person who wants to improve their language or learn a language, the first thing they need to be is realistic. Lower your expectations.
It takes time, but the good news is we know how to do it. If you enjoy it enough, you will continue doing it, and the way you do that is by finding comprehensible input.