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 is 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.

Those of you who have been around in the field for a while remember, oh, about 15, 20 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, one group gets the other.

Then about 15 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 10 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 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 is 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 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, 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'll 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.

Here's lesson number one.

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 repeated 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, ja, I can hear you, even though it's a TV audience. And here I'll draw a picture now.

It's good, ja? This is Mr. Spock, ja?

Mr. Spock has two ears.

Ears.

Do you understand ears?

He has two ears.

Okay, Mr. Spock, ja?

Ah, no.

Sorry.

Eyes.

Do you understand eyes?

Eyes.

How many eyes?

One, two, three eyes.

Three eyes.

Is that right?

Three eyes?

No.

We only have two eyes.

Mouth.

Do you understand mouth?

And here's a cigarette, ja?

No.

Cigarettes are not good.

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 we read.

Comprehensible input, in my opinion, has been the last resort of the language teaching profession.

We've tried everything else.

We've tried grammar teaching, drills and exercises, computers, etc.

But the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand, comprehensible input.

Now one of the reasons lesson number two was better than lesson number one is we had Mr. Spock to help us out.

So anything that helps make input comprehensible.

Pictures, knowledge of the world, realia, etc. helps language acquisition.

If comprehensible input is true, what we call the input hypothesis is true, other things follow from it.

And 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, etc.

And if you're an insomniac, you're welcome to look at all that.

But rather than go through that, I'd like instead to tell you a story that illustrates the same point.

I've used this story for a long time.

So those of you who have heard it before, I've been using this for about 15 years.

And the reason I stay with it is that it makes the point very well.

And I've discovered it's just about a universal experience.

What has 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 briefly living in exile from California, working at the City University of New York at 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 four years old.

Her name was Itomi.

And I didn't know about this material on language acquisition then.

Nobody did.

And I thought then the way you get people to acquire a language is you get them to practice talking.

So I tried to get her to talk.

I'd say, Itomi, talk to me.

Say good morning.

Say hi.

No response.

Well, clearly, I decided I've got to make this more concrete.

Itomi, say ball.

No response.

Well, obviously, I've got to break it down into its component parts.

Let's work on initial consonants.

Say buh.

Look at my lips.

Again, no response.

There's 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, Itomi 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 pick up certain expressions from the other children in the neighborhood.

It's not real language.

They understand approximately what they mean.

Again, it's not real language.

They have a rough idea what it means.

They use it in roughly appropriate situations.

Things like leave me alone, get out of 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, Itomi 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 Itomi and her family went back 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 going to call on you.

No one's going to 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.

Before I leave this topic, let me put in a brief commercial message for speaking.

I'm not opposed to speaking.

I think when students 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 students speaking, but we have to understand it makes a helpful but indirect contribution to language acquisition.

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.

Research in language acquisition has concluded that there are several factors that relate to success in language acquisition, and I'm going to list them here on your screen.

One factor is motivation.

Students who are more motivated do better in language acquisition.

Those of you who study this know that it's a little more complicated than this, but this is a good approximation.

Second, self-esteem, probably 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.