Revisiting Language Learning 2 of 5 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello again.   Today I'm going to be talking about Revisiting Language Learning, my second program in a series of 5.  Today I want to talk about key skills in language learning.  It's related to the issue of what some people tell me is – I can't learn a language.  I heard that a lot.  'I'm no good at that.  I flunked Spanish in high school', for example.  Really what you're telling me when you say things like that is that you were not successful in learning a particular kind of language in a particular kind of way.  There are many different ways to learn a language.  As we look at this, we need to remember that language learning occurs in many different places, ways and times with varying degrees of success and failure.

How did you learn English?  Most of you learned English, if English is your first language, growing up in your family.  You learned about what was going on and how to deal with things by observing.  You spoke in sentences.  You think about that.  Most babies speak with one word, but that one word is a sentence already.  'Ba' – what does that mean?  That means 'can I have my bottle please?' Now certainly it takes people years and some of us are still trying to learn to speak in complete sentences, but that is how we learn.  We learn by observing, we learn by listening, we learn by imitating, we learn by being involved.  Indeed, what are the key skills in language learning?  I'm going to try to tell you what some of them are.  I'm not saying this is a definitive list.  This is a list of crucial characteristics, attitudes or stances in language learning. 

The first one is making mistakes.  Language learning is nothing but a series of making mistakes.  You listen to something and you're hopelessly confused.  You try it out and they look at you, puzzled.  You wander around at figuring it out and practicing but you make mistakes and mistakes are a part of language learning. 

The second – listening.  Listening is an absolute essential, bedrock characteristic for language learning.  Now, I'm talking about listening in a number of areas.  I'm not talking about just specifically listening with somebody trying to learn something specific, like a sentence, question or command.  Listening is many different kinds.  Primary listening is coming up with the story for the baker as I mentioned before.  Secondary listening is kind of like trying out words with people and listening to their response.  Terciary listening is watching television, trying to familiarize yourself with the sounds, the tones, the cadence of language, riding on the bus listening to other peoples' conversations, doing a lot of that.  I learned soccer Spanish by watching Spanish language TV with my son who is quite interested in soccer.  We sort of picked up words and knew what was being said.  It was also kind of funny because we knew a lot of the words but then some of the dads of the Hispanic boys on my son's team were using other words which I think were swear words.  In some of those cases I was glad that the umpire was not bilingual because we probably would have gotten in a lot of trouble.  That's a humorous example.

A third arena, or skill, in listening is involvement.  You don't pick up a language by being uninvolved.  Some people like to do language learning in a classroom, some people like to have a CD that they can work on their computer and with technology there are a lot of creative ways that you can use language learning.  Language learning, however, is a communicative exercise that is most effective when using live people.  That sounds kind of obvious but a lot of people forget that.  You need to have that.  Why?  That's because language learning is not simply learning to use words.  Language learning is an environmental process that is being involved in all the stuff, knowing what's going on, how they look when you say what you say, how they correct...all of that is stuff that you can't pick up right now with technology.  Maybe someday technology will do that but until it does you have to be involved. 

The fourth key skill is practice.  One concept that I've heard many language teachers say is 'murder it until you master it'.  That gets back to mistake making in that you have to know and give yourself the ability to make the mistakes because you are going to pick up accents, responses, feelings involved and that's very important.  You need to do that. 

The fifth key skill in language learning may not be something that those of you that are already using the language can utilize, but that is to take complete advantage of the honeymoon phase.  What do I mean by that?  I mean that every new person in the community who's trying to learn language is often excused for their bumbling attempts.  'Oh, that's okay.  He didn't mean that...she didn't mean to say that that way because she is just learning our language'.  The honeymoon phase gives you a chance to become endearing to those people around you and you need to take advantage of that.  Why?  This story illustrates the problem.  'I was working with a business that had people in a particular country and they were very focused on meeting the terms of their contract.  Since their contracts were written in a way that didn't take into account helping them become effective members of the community, there was no allowance for any sort of time for language learning.  It was like you get off the plane, you check into your apartment and the next Monday you start work.  Nothing about language learning.  Now this was the Americans' contract.  Some of them were happy -  'Thank goodness I don't have to learn the language'.  What they discovered is that there are a lot of things that you can do in English but there are a lot of things that you can't do.  What do you do at the end of the day?  If you can use English in your office, how do you go get a cup of coffee elsewhere?  How do you get your groceries?  How do you make friends?  Those things weren't getting done.  Now after about 5 years of this, one of the national leaders of this business came over to visit the corporate offices in the United States and was picked up by some corporate member who related it to me.  Evidently he decided that this American was trustworthy and said to the person, 'Tell me something.  Why do you send such unqualified people to work in my country?' He was taken aback by the honesty, but he asked, 'What do you mean?' This person said, 'Some of your people have been there 5 years and they still can't even communicate simplistically in our language and we find that embarrassing and a real put down to us'.  Now, this attitude probably wasn't recognized in their company because those people looked and said, 'Well, I'm doing my job.  I'm doing my contract and we're achieving.'  But the national was getting at something very important and that was that what is coming across by your attitude of refusal to learn a language is that you don't respect others.  That negated the whole reason why they were there.  It was very sad and it broke my heart to hear that because I knew a lot of the people that were doing the work and they were good, qualified people but they didn't have a good attitude about learning language.

How about you?  How are you doing?  Are you in a situation like that?  It's never too late to change.  Maybe the honeymoon phase is over for you, but there is a secondary honeymoon phase.  That is if you go to your friends and say, 'You know what...I need to do better in this.  This is a goal I've set for myself.  Would you help me?'  Those people are most likely going to be very positive in their response to that.  They're going to want to help.  They're probably going to tell you all kinds of stories about what you've done and how embarrassing that has been.  That is good because once again it's relationship building.

Think about how you're doing and what you want to change.

Talk to you next time!