I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it’s all totally gone from my brain.
My mother’s native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
Language classes in most of the USA are based around memorization but more and more evidence is backing up the “language acquisition” model of language learning. Rote memorization is wholly insufficient and most of us learn language first and foremost by simply listening to “comprehensible input”. By hearing this comprehensible input enough we sort of just absorb it naturally. Like we were built for it. Or more because we evolved exactly to be able to do this.
But how do you structure a class around that and test students for it when you need at least 3 months of basic comprehensible input for at least an hour or two a day (the more the better) like this to acquire enough language to start to grasp basic sentences and common words? When using this method you aren’t expected or even encouraged to try and speak the language during those first few months. And for most kids who take this for one semester how can you show progress when you shouldn’t expect even basic fluency until you are a year or two out using this method? Yet people who stick to this method do actually learn languages and really internalize this in about 3-5 years to full conversational fluency. We all learned at least one language language this way: our first one.
Our school system is simply not designed to handle learning that works this way. If you want to learn Spanish look into Language Acquisition Model stuff. Dreaming Spanish on YouTube has tons of beginner comprehensible input videos. Once you watch one, you’ll understand exactly what it is trying to do and it becomes obvious why it would work. You aren’t supposed to understand immediately. At first you kind of get the jist a little even though you only understand like 10% of the words. Then you start recognizing structure and more words and understand more. In a few months it starts coming along better. Then you take the next step and move onto videos that aren’t designed for this method, just people speaking Spanish and it suddenly gets super hard. But if you stick with it, you can and will really learn any language this way.
EDIT: As an aside I’m forever mad that we have a true all-American language here in the USA and it’s not taught to every child in school: American Sign Language. It’s not just spoken words signed with your hands. It has its own grammar and rules and It provides accessibility to the deaf. It is useful even for those who can hear. If I ruled this shithole ASL would be a standard class from Elementary to High-school. In two generations everyone would know basic ASL.
I really like your ASL idea. that kind of basic communicative ability across modes would be very useful.
You are right insofar as rote memorization not being an ideal way to become a fluent language user, but “language acquisition model” is not a theoretical framework. Language Acquisition is a sub-field of linguistics.
“Comprehensible input” is an untestable hypothesis from the 1970s by a researcher named Krashen. Immersion methods are perfectly fine ways to acquire language–both grammar and vocabulary–but a massive benefit to already having a first language means that you can leverage your existing linguistic schemata (e.g., mappings for abstract concepts onto words, grammatical categories, etc.) to jumpstart your second language competencies.
With structured instruction and ample opportunities to practice speaking conversationally, a classroom learner can achieve the same level of conversational fluency as someone who learned the language immersively.
Further, a purely conversational course would not lead directly to improvement in the domains of reading and writing. There are some synergies, but these are separate skills that need to be targeted by specific pedagogic interventions. This is why children learning their first language still need to go to school to learn how to read, of course. And a major benefit of learning to read is then reading to learn.
The primary issue here is classroom time. Language instructors need to focus on a million different things. Here’s a no comprehensive list off the top of my head: the domains of reading, writing, speaking, and listening; compositional modality (e.g. presentational speech, colloquial speech, presentational writing, genre-specific conventions for persuasiveness/humor/storytelling/etc.); general vocabulary and grammar; specific vocabulary and grammar (e.g. for home/academic/professional/etc domains); social norms (again by domain); cultural literacy (again by domain); etc.
And then divide the instructor’s time by the number of students.
A learner needs to integrate within a speech community and continue practicing these skills within the appropriate contexts, or they atrophy. The foreign language context (i.e., the target language is not commonly spoken in daily life near the learner) is terrible at this, because it means that the learner does not have easy access to others with whom to practice and from whom to learn.
Tldr; use your other languages to help you speed up the baseline memorization and pattern recognition skills that are fundamental to contextual application, find a community, and do language with them.
My bona fides are a PhD in the subject and a decade of language teaching in US public schools and universities
Thank you for talking the real sense here.
What do you mean it’s “untested”. You learned a language through comprehensible input and so did I. So did every single person on this website. It is the most tested method of language learning in human history.