by Kaj Vardinghus
I have coined the term Significant Input by combining Carl Rogers’ Significant Learning (Experiential Learning) with Stephen Krashen’s Comprehensible Input (The Input Hypothesis).
Through my own experience with language learners of all ages and walks of life, I have learned that language penetrates and is acquired when input is significant and motivating to the learner. I shall try to explain myself by shortly describing the ideas of Carl Rogers, Stephen Krashen and Malcolm Knowles (Andragogy) in relation to learning content (input) and add a few comments and examples from my own experience.
In Experiential Learning (Rogers, Carl R., 1969), Carl Rogers talks about personal involvement, self-evaluation (what the learner needs and wants to learn) and that learning should mean something to the learner. Although Rogers’ ideas were not only directed at language learning, they are absolutely valid in this context. Rogers showed us that the content must be meaningful to the learner. I real life, language learners often have to learn a particular language which is not necessarily chosen by them, so the “teacher” (facilitator) or the learner himself, must create learning experiences that lead to personal involvement and make the language learning experience more than just another “have-to-do task”.
During the first class with my learners I always ask them what topics they like and what their immediate needs for using the language are. This way I can prepare classes that are meaningful to them by using topics that are interesting to them, or if they are professionals in need of specific work-skills, meaningful because they see the relevance of the vocabulary and language skills for doing their jobs. Learners who want to do a self-study should also do such an “interest/needs analysis”, to find the topics and real needs that will keep their attention while working on improving their language skills.
If classes are done with a facilitator, he or she often has to go a “long distance” to get real results. At the moment of this writing, I’m teaching a teenager, and although he says he likes this and that, I can really only get his complete attention when we talk about Basketball. Believe me, I’m not an expert on Basketball, but I can use video-clips, texts and vocabulary that I find on the Internet, and of course, use his knowledge to tell me about Basketball (in English of course). He has definitely improved his English in a very short time, and recently his mother called me to say thanks. She told me that he is doing much better at English at school.
Stephen Krashen (Krashen, S., 1982) also touches on penetration in his “Affective Filter Hypothesis”, showing that affective factors like motivation, self-confidence and anxiety influence the penetration of the language the learner is exposed to. So supplying the learner with Comprehensible Input does not suffice – input and method must be emotionally and adequately suited to the individual learner or learners.
Language institutes and schools ask their teachers to evaluate learners on an on-going basis, often each class, to have an idea what skill-area needs work. Unfortunately, it often becomes quite mechanical like: “xx needs to improve her listening skills”, and perhaps time is not always spent on doing emotional and/or needs assessments. Here is an example from my own work:
“Once I was hired to give one-to-one classes to an executive from a large Brazilian company. The material I was supposed to use, was all related to listening skills, as teachers had written that the learner needed to improve his listening skills in the class-reports (no-one had really tried to understand the root of the problem). Very well, I began the classes telling him that we were going to work on his listening skills and gave him a short overview of the material, and then we began. The first activity went quite well, the second one a little worse and the third was a complete disaster! He had begun yawning, so I asked him if he was bored or sleepy, but he said “No”. Then I asked him if he was anxious – he said, “Perhaps a little”. There I stopped the listening activities to find out what the real affective problem was. Soon I found out that in his childhood he had had individual classes with a very aggressive woman, and that these listening activities brought back feelings of this childhood experience. I spend the rest of the day working on his listening skills by talking with him about his problem (including using a simple NLP phobia elimination technique), his life and his work. And guess what? Utilising this format, he had no real listening problem!”
This shows that content and form must be tailored to the individual! I also try to base the learners’ further studies on their real needs, meaning, problem areas that are identified during classes, to work on what the learners don’t master in the language, and not, what they already have seen and learned well!
Malcolm Knowles, who was clearly inspired by the qualities of good facilitation argued for by Carl Rogers, in his Andragogy Theory, highlights that adults are self-directed and expect to take responsibility for decisions. Adult learning programs must therefore accommodate this fundamental aspect.
The principles of his theory are:
1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities.
3. Adults are more interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life.
4. Adult learning is problem-centred rather than content-oriented.
All these principles apply to language learning as well. I would even go further and say, that these principles are valid for teenagers too. Teenagers have reached a time in their life when they begin to question what happens to- and around them – they have begun to form their own opinions.
If we look at these principles individually, we can see that they match quite well what I’ve already mentioned above:
1. Involvement in planning – the needs analysis I’ve mentioned above.
2. Learning experience – further activities based on “what they don’t master” (“their real needs” – here language needs).
3. Learning subjects – especially the professionals mentioned above.
4. Problem centred – working on tasks in the language, not necessarily focusing on language forms, and this way acquiring the language.
So, as we have seen in above, content, form and emotional issues matter when we are learning. That is what I call SIGNIFICANT INPUT.
In conclusion: it is important to design or choose skills activities (reading, writing, speaking and listening) according to the learner’s interest and needs to keep his/her attention and thus gaining maximum results from the studies. This also applies to completely self-initiated studies.
Copyright © Kaj Vardinghus 2009
References:
Unpublished notes on Significant Input, Vardinghus, Kaj, 2006
Krashen, S. (1982), Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Pergamon
Krashen, S. & Terrell, T.D. (1983), The Natural Approach, Pergamon
Rogers, Carl R. (1973) Liberdade para aprender. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Interlivros
Rogers, Carl R. (1969) Freedom to learn. Colombia, Ohio, USA: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company
Knowles, M. (1975). Self-Directed Learning. Chicago: Follet.
Knowles, M. (1984). The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species (3rd Ed.). Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing.
Knowles, M. (1984). Andragogy in Action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Tuesday, 4 August 2009
The Stop Thinking Language Hypothesis - a Fluency and Accuracy Strategy
By Kaj Vardinghus
This hypothesis is the result of more than thirteen years of “on and off” empirical research in language learning. The evidence on the hypothesis that learners 1) reach fluency when they apply the strategy of not thinking language and 2) accuracy when they trust in the strategy and begin listening to themselves for self-correction when we look at spoken language production, is based on my own perceptions and coupled with a few ideas from linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific research.
Before looking into some evidence to back up the Stop Thinking Language Hypothesis, let me just share with you my ideas on how our language skills are built.
Acquiring language skills: passive skills vs. active skills
The model and the explanations below represent my view on how we acquire knowledge of, or learn about a language, and how it is put into practice:
Explanations:
INPUT
There are of course only two ways we can acquire knowledge of a language: either by listening or reading. To increase our active skills (output) we need large quantities of input (listening and reading).
A. PASSIVE SKILLS
Paying attention when we listen or read generates passive knowledge.
B. STORED AS PASSIVE KNOWLEDGE
We store the passive knowledge and are often able to recognise it when someone speaks it or we read it. It is passive because we may not be able to use it in our spoken or written production. You might have noticed that we can always understand more language than we actually are able to produce, even in L1 - large amounts of knowledge has not become active.
C. ACTIVE SKILLS
When we apply the strategy of speaking without thinking sentences and at the same time listen to ourselves, we are able to retrieve passive knowledge and thereby create active knowledge. Somehow when it is produced it becomes active.
The evidence for the Stop Thinking Language Hypothesis contains further explanations.
# 1 – Reverse effect
A little more than a decade ago, I worked as a General English Teacher at a famous English School in São Paulo, Brazil. My story begins by observing adolescent-and teenage learners. I noticed that more than often the “lazy boys” reached fluency, and sometimes even accuracy, faster than the hard-studying and thorough girls. That puzzled me for a while. How could it be that dedicated students acquired language slower than the ones who did not study at all? (I am not saying that one should not study, but merely drawing the attention to the learner’s mindset).
Looking into the realms of hypnotism, another passion of mine, we may find an answer to above question in the Father of Applied Conditioning, Emile Couê’s laws of suggestion. His Law of Reverse Effect says: "The harder one tries to do something, the less chance one has of success". To understand what that means, let me give you an example from Emile Couê’s book “Self-mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion” (Couê, E, 1922) in his own words:
“Have you not noticed that the more you try to remember the name of a person which you have forgotten, the more it eludes you, until, substituting in your mind the idea “I shall remember in a minute” to the idea “I have forgotten”, the name comes back to you without the least effort?”
In the classroom, exposure to extreme focus on accuracy, grammar and over-correction may induce learners unconsciously to create autosuggestions causing a Reverse Effect (the harder one tries to do it, the less chance one has of success).
# 2 – Unconscious / semiconscious production - A natural strategy
I got this insight by observing myself acquiring Portuguese by listening and reading. I have never taken a course of Portuguese, but even so, after a certain period of time, I heard ME speaking language which I did not even know I knew. At present I consider myself a proficient speaker and writer of Brazilian Portuguese.
To understand that fluency and accuracy actually comes from producing without thinking language (not the same as “not thinking”) and listening to what one says (for self-correction) read these questions reflect on them:
When speaking your native language…
Do you actually think language when you are speaking? Do you think up everything you are going to say? Do think about the grammar or what is right or wrong?
Exactly, you don’t!
Even though, on one hand deciding to speak is a conscious process, on the other hand natural spoken language production seems to be unconscious or semiconscious. These same two terms are used by Gerald R. McMenamin (McMenamin. G. R., 2002) talking about style in composition.
We do not think language or sentences at all before speaking anything our native language, so, beyond a very basic level of a foreign language production, perhaps we should apply the same natural strategy.
# 3 - Interference
As we have just seen, thinking grammar and syntax whilst speaking is not a natural process.
As a language learner, you may have experienced following: “During class, you thought about the grammar and the words that you wanted to say, got everything right in your head (and it probably was), but when you finally spoke it, to your frustration, your teacher corrected a couple of mistakes”. In this example, you were so concentrated on this task that you did not hear what you said. The example suggests that you are not always in complete control of what you pay attention to, that consciously building language might inhibit listening to what you say. There was some sort of interference between what you built in your head and what you actually said.
The mentioned interference resembles a lot what occurs in the Stroop test (Stroop, J.R., 1935; MacLeod, C. M 1991) which tests the subject on naming the printed colours of words for colours. The subjects are shown words for colour names with the words printed in either the colour of the meaning or different from the meaning. The subject has to name the colour of the ink. Somehow, when the colour and the word do not match, the reaction time is longer. This interference is called the Stroop effect and research indicates that it involves activating frontal regions of the brain (Miller, B. L. and Cummings, J. L., 2007).
Professor Mark Dubin, in his book “How the Brain Works”, (Dubin, M., 2002), after having presented the Stroop effect, closes his section on reading with following comment: “This interaction is just one example showing that understanding language is part of a deeper cognitive system which is always working to make the myriad of inputs that are constantly bombarding us into something sensible”. He describes speaking this way: “Speaking starts with an idea. It must then be turned into semantically appropriate, proper syntax that must be turned into motor movements. Thus, it’s not surprising that the areas of the brain that are activated when the thought is being turned into a sentence to be spoken are much the same frontal regions as those used to understand speech”. I believe that the interference occurs in these frontal areas of the brain when we unnaturally try to think up sentences.
For over a century scientists have tried to understand how the brain learns, stores and process language, but it is only over the past two decades that it has been possible to picture the normal brain process language (Caplan, D., 1995). In the introduction to “The Neural organization of discourse - An H215O-PET study of narrative production in English and American Sign Language” (A.R. Braun et al., 2001) following ideas on natural speech indicates that it is not only me who sees a difference between natural speech and metalinguistic production: “Ultimately, metalinguistic tasks, whether conducted at the level of the sentence or the single word, are artificial. They provoke the use of cognitive strategies unrelated to the use of natural language and since current neuroimaging methods are extremely task-sensitive, the results may in the end reflect these strategies rather than revealing what happens in the brain during real-world linguistic behaviour.”
To avoid interference in spoken language production, and reach better fluency and accuracy, learners must learn to apply a natural speech strategy that involves letting language flow naturally from its unconscious level and listen to what they are saying.
Summary and conclusion
In short we have seen that:
#1 extreme focus on accuracy, grammar and over-correction may generate a reverse effect: learners are not acquiring fluency.
#2 natural native speech does not involve thinking the language one is going to speak.
#3 Metalinguistic Production is different from Natural Speech.
Conclusion: beyond a very basic level of L2 learning, we should create approaches that help learners adopt the Stop Thinking Language Strategy. Any learner that has already reached a good level of fluency and accuracy has unconsciously applied this strategy.
(Copyright © Kaj Vardinghus, 2009)
References:
Couê, E, Self Mastery through conscious Autosuggestion, 1922, chapter 2: Will and imagination.
McMenamin, G. R., Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics, CRC PRESS 2002, p. 169.
Stroop, J. R., Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions, George Peabody College, first published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-662, 1935.
MacLeod, C. M., Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.
Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 109(2), 1991, p. 163-203
Miller, B. L. and Cummings, J. L., The human frontal lobes – functions and disorders (The Science and Practice of Neuropsychology) The Guilford Press, (second edition), 2007, p. 297-298.
Dubin, M, How the brain works, Blackwell Science, 2002, p. 54-55.
Caplan, D, Language and the Brain, the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute Letter, Volume 4, 1995.
A. R. Braun et al., The Neural organization of discourse - An H215O-PET study of narrative production in English and American Sign Language, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 1-2.
This hypothesis is the result of more than thirteen years of “on and off” empirical research in language learning. The evidence on the hypothesis that learners 1) reach fluency when they apply the strategy of not thinking language and 2) accuracy when they trust in the strategy and begin listening to themselves for self-correction when we look at spoken language production, is based on my own perceptions and coupled with a few ideas from linguistic, psychological, and neuroscientific research.
Before looking into some evidence to back up the Stop Thinking Language Hypothesis, let me just share with you my ideas on how our language skills are built.
Acquiring language skills: passive skills vs. active skills
The model and the explanations below represent my view on how we acquire knowledge of, or learn about a language, and how it is put into practice:
Explanations:INPUT
There are of course only two ways we can acquire knowledge of a language: either by listening or reading. To increase our active skills (output) we need large quantities of input (listening and reading).
A. PASSIVE SKILLS
Paying attention when we listen or read generates passive knowledge.
B. STORED AS PASSIVE KNOWLEDGE
We store the passive knowledge and are often able to recognise it when someone speaks it or we read it. It is passive because we may not be able to use it in our spoken or written production. You might have noticed that we can always understand more language than we actually are able to produce, even in L1 - large amounts of knowledge has not become active.
C. ACTIVE SKILLS
When we apply the strategy of speaking without thinking sentences and at the same time listen to ourselves, we are able to retrieve passive knowledge and thereby create active knowledge. Somehow when it is produced it becomes active.
The evidence for the Stop Thinking Language Hypothesis contains further explanations.
# 1 – Reverse effect
A little more than a decade ago, I worked as a General English Teacher at a famous English School in São Paulo, Brazil. My story begins by observing adolescent-and teenage learners. I noticed that more than often the “lazy boys” reached fluency, and sometimes even accuracy, faster than the hard-studying and thorough girls. That puzzled me for a while. How could it be that dedicated students acquired language slower than the ones who did not study at all? (I am not saying that one should not study, but merely drawing the attention to the learner’s mindset).
Looking into the realms of hypnotism, another passion of mine, we may find an answer to above question in the Father of Applied Conditioning, Emile Couê’s laws of suggestion. His Law of Reverse Effect says: "The harder one tries to do something, the less chance one has of success". To understand what that means, let me give you an example from Emile Couê’s book “Self-mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion” (Couê, E, 1922) in his own words:
“Have you not noticed that the more you try to remember the name of a person which you have forgotten, the more it eludes you, until, substituting in your mind the idea “I shall remember in a minute” to the idea “I have forgotten”, the name comes back to you without the least effort?”
In the classroom, exposure to extreme focus on accuracy, grammar and over-correction may induce learners unconsciously to create autosuggestions causing a Reverse Effect (the harder one tries to do it, the less chance one has of success).
# 2 – Unconscious / semiconscious production - A natural strategy
I got this insight by observing myself acquiring Portuguese by listening and reading. I have never taken a course of Portuguese, but even so, after a certain period of time, I heard ME speaking language which I did not even know I knew. At present I consider myself a proficient speaker and writer of Brazilian Portuguese.
To understand that fluency and accuracy actually comes from producing without thinking language (not the same as “not thinking”) and listening to what one says (for self-correction) read these questions reflect on them:
When speaking your native language…
Do you actually think language when you are speaking? Do you think up everything you are going to say? Do think about the grammar or what is right or wrong?
Exactly, you don’t!
Even though, on one hand deciding to speak is a conscious process, on the other hand natural spoken language production seems to be unconscious or semiconscious. These same two terms are used by Gerald R. McMenamin (McMenamin. G. R., 2002) talking about style in composition.
We do not think language or sentences at all before speaking anything our native language, so, beyond a very basic level of a foreign language production, perhaps we should apply the same natural strategy.
# 3 - Interference
As we have just seen, thinking grammar and syntax whilst speaking is not a natural process.
As a language learner, you may have experienced following: “During class, you thought about the grammar and the words that you wanted to say, got everything right in your head (and it probably was), but when you finally spoke it, to your frustration, your teacher corrected a couple of mistakes”. In this example, you were so concentrated on this task that you did not hear what you said. The example suggests that you are not always in complete control of what you pay attention to, that consciously building language might inhibit listening to what you say. There was some sort of interference between what you built in your head and what you actually said.
The mentioned interference resembles a lot what occurs in the Stroop test (Stroop, J.R., 1935; MacLeod, C. M 1991) which tests the subject on naming the printed colours of words for colours. The subjects are shown words for colour names with the words printed in either the colour of the meaning or different from the meaning. The subject has to name the colour of the ink. Somehow, when the colour and the word do not match, the reaction time is longer. This interference is called the Stroop effect and research indicates that it involves activating frontal regions of the brain (Miller, B. L. and Cummings, J. L., 2007).
Professor Mark Dubin, in his book “How the Brain Works”, (Dubin, M., 2002), after having presented the Stroop effect, closes his section on reading with following comment: “This interaction is just one example showing that understanding language is part of a deeper cognitive system which is always working to make the myriad of inputs that are constantly bombarding us into something sensible”. He describes speaking this way: “Speaking starts with an idea. It must then be turned into semantically appropriate, proper syntax that must be turned into motor movements. Thus, it’s not surprising that the areas of the brain that are activated when the thought is being turned into a sentence to be spoken are much the same frontal regions as those used to understand speech”. I believe that the interference occurs in these frontal areas of the brain when we unnaturally try to think up sentences.
For over a century scientists have tried to understand how the brain learns, stores and process language, but it is only over the past two decades that it has been possible to picture the normal brain process language (Caplan, D., 1995). In the introduction to “The Neural organization of discourse - An H215O-PET study of narrative production in English and American Sign Language” (A.R. Braun et al., 2001) following ideas on natural speech indicates that it is not only me who sees a difference between natural speech and metalinguistic production: “Ultimately, metalinguistic tasks, whether conducted at the level of the sentence or the single word, are artificial. They provoke the use of cognitive strategies unrelated to the use of natural language and since current neuroimaging methods are extremely task-sensitive, the results may in the end reflect these strategies rather than revealing what happens in the brain during real-world linguistic behaviour.”
To avoid interference in spoken language production, and reach better fluency and accuracy, learners must learn to apply a natural speech strategy that involves letting language flow naturally from its unconscious level and listen to what they are saying.
Summary and conclusion
In short we have seen that:
#1 extreme focus on accuracy, grammar and over-correction may generate a reverse effect: learners are not acquiring fluency.
#2 natural native speech does not involve thinking the language one is going to speak.
#3 Metalinguistic Production is different from Natural Speech.
Conclusion: beyond a very basic level of L2 learning, we should create approaches that help learners adopt the Stop Thinking Language Strategy. Any learner that has already reached a good level of fluency and accuracy has unconsciously applied this strategy.
(Copyright © Kaj Vardinghus, 2009)
References:
Couê, E, Self Mastery through conscious Autosuggestion, 1922, chapter 2: Will and imagination.
McMenamin, G. R., Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics, CRC PRESS 2002, p. 169.
Stroop, J. R., Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions, George Peabody College, first published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-662, 1935.
MacLeod, C. M., Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.
Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 109(2), 1991, p. 163-203
Miller, B. L. and Cummings, J. L., The human frontal lobes – functions and disorders (The Science and Practice of Neuropsychology) The Guilford Press, (second edition), 2007, p. 297-298.
Dubin, M, How the brain works, Blackwell Science, 2002, p. 54-55.
Caplan, D, Language and the Brain, the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute Letter, Volume 4, 1995.
A. R. Braun et al., The Neural organization of discourse - An H215O-PET study of narrative production in English and American Sign Language, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 1-2.
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