The prevailing opinion on language learning seems to be that languages can only be mastered in a short time by babies. Why? Patricia Kuhl from MIT has been doing neurolinguistic research to understand why. Very interestingly though, she shows a graph in her lecture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954) which shows the best period for the brain to acquire languages. It should come as no surprise that, according to her, the older you become, the more dificult it becomes to learn a language. Conventional wisdom seems to have the same thing to say on the matter.
Moreover, the quantifiable parts of language (grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology) have been used as a means to define whether a language is difficult for an English native speaker to learn, by contrasting the two languages to see which languages are more similar (and therefore easier to learn) the native language (in this case, English).
Yes, it is a blog, but scroll down to the bottom of the graph and you will see that she based the graph on information provided by U.S. Government and Federal institutes. Conventional wisdom indeed. (please note that I disagree immensely with this information, it takes infants all over the world to acquire language at the same speed, therefore the same rationally stands for adults, we just haven't explored this yet as its nice to have the lazy excuse of "I'm too old" saving us from thought.)
Part of the idea behind organic language acquisition is to prove:
- adults can learn languages more efficiently than infants
- conventional methods and approaches of language analysis and language instruction is fatally flawed
Why is it that an infant is thought to be a linguistic genius and yet its not even developed enough to put together a coherent sentence? There seems to be a flaw here...
Search through every characteristic exhibitted by infants and adults during any language learning tasks and you'll notice a few interesting things. Adults do not have a blank slate, as compared with infants, but rather they are constantly translating. This is frequently seem as counter-productive but wait a bit. For a child to reproduce a word, much less a sentence, it takes much more time than for an adult. However, the adult will probably become arrogant, seeing their reproduction of the sentence as some sort of accomplishment, and then forget it. The infant, on the other hand, is a blank slate remember, so it will be next to impossible for it to forget.
Imagine a blank canvas next to a finished painting. Now draw a smiley face on both. The one is defined by the smiley whilst the other is merely 'modified' by it. (subject,of course, to size, colour, location and style of the smiley).
Current methodology and approaches to language analysis and instruction seems incredibly fixated on frame works which yield terrible results. Anyone who has studied a language will testify to the fact that no matter how much you know the grammar, unless you can produce sentences written or spoken, you will not have learnt anything.
When adults learn, they need only use a few tools which conventional wisdom leaves behind: mnemonics, collocations, the nature of short-term memory vs. long-term memory, the 'exploratory' mindset, and perhaps the ever-elusive authentic material (most material in an English language course book is synthetic).
Language acquisition is a feat of memory and creativity. Two things that adults can excel at better than any child. Though a difference exists between first and second language acquisition, it stands to reason that there is an efficient method of putting language in the brain, and that this process can be artificially stimulated.
This is the aim of this blog.
Add to that the fact that a child only starts becoming understandable 'round age 3 or 4...and even still then, not very coherent. 3 to 4 years of language learning and sit barely conversational? Hmmmm. I think apart from being lazy, adults are just set in their ways. It is more difficult for adults because we have our L1 ingrained into our minds. We have to shed so many habits of our L1 to get the intonation, pronunciation and stress of L2 into our minds. I think that is why they say, once you've learnt a second language, number 3 and 4 becomes easier.
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PS. I really love the smiley face analogy. You've always rocked at those :-D
PPS. Rock on Organic Language Acquisition blog!!