Beach

Two Articles: How to Teach a New Language

by Prof Bruce M. Beach

Director of the World Language Process, of which LangX is a part

How to Teach a New Language

Dr. Prof. Stephen Krashen (University of Southern California), has pointed out that languages are best 'acquired' from other speakers. Unfortunately, at least initially, many of those who will need to be taught the Universal Auxiliary Language will not have mothers who speak it and perhaps not even personal interface with 'native' speakers from which to learn the language.

There may be such an initial need for masses of people to learn the Universal Auxiliary Language, that it cannot be rapidly spread through 'traditional' language teaching methods, or by 'professionally trained teachers' who have spent several years acquiring it and even more years in being trained as teachers.

Fortunately, new technology, advances in pedagogical method, and new understanding about the nature of language itself, make a solution possible.

New technology.

Technology in the teaching field, as in most every other field, has advanced rapidly in the last century. In that period we have advanced from lanternslides to 16mm film projectors; to analogue video tape recorders; to a variety of digital delivery formats. Because of cost of delivery, not every technology is suitable for mass education and because of differing situations no one technology or method will be suitable for all situations.

Key considerations in selecting technologies will be performance / cost, the latter represented by ease of replicability and cost of delivery. Experimentation over several decades has found a key consideration to be the need for presentation material to be 'evergreen', that is to say amenable to repeated easy modification. Three great technological boons finally appeared in this regard. The first was digital non-linear editing and storage and more recently the development of highly realistic computer generated voices and talking head animations.

Computer generated voice permits perfect standardization of pronunciation and talking head animations permit evergreen production.

Some technologies, while producing excellent results, simply are not economically feasible. Interactive computer programs, high-speed delivery via the Internet or fibre optics, and many other modern advances, while marvellous in their attainments, will probably not be sufficiently universally available in an optimum time frame. Unfortunately, for many of the more deprived parts of the world, systems that require electricity, no matter how inexpensive, will face severe hurdles in achieving delivery.

Advances in pedagogical method

In the last century, there have been millions of experiments, hundreds of thousands of researchers, tens of thousands of books, and many thousands of systems devoted to developing new methods for language learning. Some have been highly commercialized but aside from the promotional propaganda associated with them have not shown any real breakthroughs. Others, such as the Montessori method in which writing precedes reading, and the IBM's Dr. John Henry Martin 'Writing to Read' system, proved to have real merit.

One of the foremost language teaching theoreticians, Dr. Prof. Stephen Krashen has emphasized five principles, the first and most importantly being, as mentioned earlier, 1. Language acquisition versus language learning. Unfortunately, as also mentioned earlier, direct interactive language acquisition from accomplished speakers may not be an approach readily available in the initial spread of a Universal Auxiliary Language.

A second principle pointed out by Krashen is what is referred to as, 2. The Monitor function. This is the necessity of the learner to find a balance in correctly applying learned rules and simply speaking as well as they can.

The third principle is that of, 3. The Natural Order Hypothesis. We shall have more to say about this in the section on language selection and development. Krashen's fourth principle is that of, 4. Input Hypothesis. One expert states that, "According to this hypothesis, the learner improves and progresses along the 'natural order' when he/she receives second language 'input' that is one step beyond his/her current stage of linguistic competence. Natural communicative input is the key to designing a syllabus, ensuring in this way that each learner will receive some 'i + 1' input that is appropriate for his/her current stage of linguistic competence."

And finally there is Krashen's, 5. Affective Filter Hypothesis, which says that the learner is affected by a number of variables such as motivation, self-confidence and non-anxiety. To these we might add native intelligence and native language learning ability. The inverse of positive variables will create a filter that impedes language acquisition.

Developers of a teaching system will do well to keep these principles in mind and assure that the system will accommodate a spectrum of variation in student characteristics.

Even with all the foregoing insight, the actual nature of human language and the manner of human language acquisition remains one of the great-unsolved mysteries of the human mind and the relationship of the mind to the brain and nervous system. Recently, substantial advances have been made in the field of split-brain studies that provide theoretical basis for some of the observed facets of the learning processes. These support some of the proposed practices such as 'writing to read' and substantiate a number of the observations of Dr. Prof. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) (University of Toronto), as to how we process information.

One particularly fruitful area of this physiological approach to learning has been in what we call the TPR or Total Physical Response Method where the student responds to verbal stimuli by actually manipulating matter (objects) in time and space. There are substantial philosophical reasons for mapping the learning process from the concrete to the abstract.

The actual techniques for implementing the above principles involves the creative development of pleasure driven systems such as games and drills and psychological motivators such as rewards and recognition systems.

In practice, some of the systems that we have experimented with and have developed to date have resulted in a curriculum of many short segments involving speech modeling by realistic computer generated animated talking heads with realistic computer generated speech, accompanied by workbooks to take advantage of the 'write to read' techniques.

Group peer reinforced activities in games and rote drills also are very beneficial especially when they involve TPR. For this reason a number of physical objects such as a small pail, a lai, a pencil, and so forth, which are particularly suitable for manipulation through time and space, are distributed to each member of a class and as a group all go through drills of performing the correct responses.

A goal is to have the student to become so motivated that they will take the initiative to practice the language on their own. This is accomplished through pleasure driven systems, one of the main ones being captioned video. Because it is easier for a learner to read a language than to hear it, this latter has proven to be an excellent tool.

Within the last decade many board language games have been developed that induce a learner to practice (in Krashen's terms we could say 'acquire') the language in participation with peers.

Comic books and simplified texts on subjects for pleasure or interest are another proven source for beneficial practice. Those learners specifically interested in language acquisition have often found pictionaries, books with grouped pictures and nouns, as a means for rapid acquisition of vocabulary.

These and many other such tools are now available to knowledgeable and creative curriculum developers and they can be used with any Universal Auxiliary Language that may be selected.

Homepage Next