Can monolingualism be cured?
Katherine Sprang
Is it possible to learn a new language as an adult? Isn’t it a lot harder than it is for children? Are there any tricks to learning?
When was the last time you studied a foreign language? Some of us think about that experience with pleasure; others think of it as one we wouldn’t ever want to repeat. If you’re over sixteen and trying to learn a new language—or thinking about learning one (and I hope you are)—remember that adults and children learn languages in very diff erent ways.
When we ask ourselves why it takes so long to learn a foreign language, it is easy for us, as adult language learners, to envy chil-dren. Th ey learn language as part of learning about the world; their minds absorb the words, phrases, and sentences they hear while they are playing or exploring—and with no apparent eff ort. Language learning is the child’s exciting full-time job for the fi rst few years of life: no studying necessary, and no homework!
But don’t forget that even with that sponge-like ability to absorb linguistic information, children have to hear and use their
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mother tongue for thousands of hours in order to master it; it typically takes them over ten years before they’re fully capable of non-childish everyday language use. Adults usually don’t have that much time to spare, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn languages and learn them very well. In some ways adults have an advantage over children. First, some elements of language can be categorized, analyzed, and explained, and these can be learned by adults more rapidly than by children learning their fi rst language.
Second, because we already have a language, adults can use what we know of our fi rst language to organize our learning of the sounds, words, and grammar of the new one. We don’t start from scratch when we learn another language.
For example, even if a language has some sounds that English doesn’t (maybe a trilled r as in ‘burro’—or an ng sound at the begin-ning of a word, like ‘nga’), chances are that most of its sounds will be familiar. Adults can take advantage of this to prioritize their pronunciation eff ort where it is most needed.
Or the new language may use word orders like ‘Th e boy brave with his rifl e the tiger fi erce shot.’ Th at sounds unnatural to an English speaker, but foreign grammatical patterns are not so dif-ferent from English that they can’t be fi gured out and mastered, like a puzzle—again, a skill that improves with age.
Learning foreign vocabulary inescapably requires many expo-sures to the words in diff erent contexts, but even here adults are well equipped to spot words related to words they already know and use them as stepping-stones into the new language. Th ey can recognize prefi xes and suffi xes, and understand the roles that those parts of words play in the new language. Adult language students—especially when aided by good teachers, textbooks, and technical aids, have the knowledge, experience, and analytic ability to recognize what’s already understandable in a new language and what’s diff erent from our fi rst language. By focusing attention on the diff erences, we as adults can jump-start our learning.
By contrast, other elements of language need to be absorbed through continual and repeated exposure. When the mind is relaxed and not seeking explanations or patterns, it’s capable of categorizing and sorting information about some elements of language without conscious eff ort. Th e aspects of language taken in best through this unconscious process—called implicit learning— tend not to be cap-tured in textbooks, and they’re seldom explained well by teachers.
In fact, in some ways it can be more eff ective simply to watch TV or listen to the radio in the language you’re trying to learn, rather than poring over rules and patterns and vocabulary lists.
Th e better we are at combining both approaches—explicit learning and implicit learning—the more eff ectively and quickly we can build our knowledge of a new language. And it’s not enough just to acquire knowledge. To a great extent, speaking, writing, and understanding a foreign language are a matter of developing skills—like learning to play the piano—that you can’t master without practice, practice, PRACTICE. Here again, children have it easier, if only because they’re uninhibited. Practicing a foreign language means you have to get past the very adult fear of embarrassment, the discomfort of doing something you are not expert at. Are you willing to walk up to strangers from another country—say, a group of tourists—and try to talk with them in their language? To the extent that you are willing to try out your budding language skills, to practice them (even if your performance is not perfect), and learn from making mistakes, your ability in the foreign language will continue to grow.
Until around the middle of the last century, language learning in school was pretty dull. It was all about memorizing vocabulary, talking about grammar—in English—and translating as many paragraphs as you could stand. We’ve learned a lot about teaching languages since then. Since the 1970s, the new discipline of Second Language Acquisition, an interdisciplinary fi eld combining cognitive science and applied linguistics, has also emerged. Th rough it we are gradually discovering which elements of a language are best taught
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through explicit instruction and which are best absorbed through sustained exposure to the language. As answers to these questions are uncovered through research, language instruction continues to improve, and adults are learning languages better than ever. So if you’re a monolingual adult, there’s no reason to continue in that sad condition. Monolingualism can be cured.
About the author
Katherine Sprang holds a Ph.D. from the German Department at George-town University, with primary specialization in Second Language Acqui-sition (SLA). She is particularly interested in how excellence in teaching can help language students achieve superior foreign-language skills. She works currently at the Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, as director of the Instructional Support Division.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Language learning by adults is also discussed in chapters 15 (language and the brain), 27 (foreign accents), 30 (language-learning tips), 31 (history of language-teaching methods), 32 (study abroad), and 34 (language-teaching technology).
Elsewhere:
Byrnes, Heidi, and Hiram Maxim. Advanced Foreign Language Learning:
A Challenge to College Programs (Heinle, 2003).
Larsen-Freeman, Diane. Teaching Language: From Grammar to Gram-maring (Heinle, 2003).