The Practical Linguist / What parents need to know Marshall R. Childs / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
My last two columns (April 11 and May 9) were about the new theory of language processing I call "attractor theory." I said that the way the brain processes language has strong implications for schools and for educational bureaucracies. In this column, I want to summarize implications of the theory for parents and learners in order to help them make decisions about language learning.
Several readers have written to ask two questions: Is it true that language-learning ability declines with age? And what is the best time to start learning a foreign language?
Language learning ability does indeed decline with age. From before birth until old age, learning of first and subsequent languages becomes slower as large-scale cell assemblies increasingly follow limited patterns, and as the growth of connective tissue slows. In fact, a child who does not learn any language when young can never learn one well. There have been mercifully few such cases, but those that have occurred demonstrate the point. Usually, however, a child's normal development includes building a rich supply of language when young.
Typically, language learning begins before birth. For about three months prior to birth, the baby's ears and neural processes for hearing are already in action. (207 words)
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The mother's voice is heard well. Immediately after birth, a baby knows (and prefers) its mother's voice, her languages, and even the stories and songs she read and sang. This prenatal learning gives newborn babies a lifetime advantage at hearing (and of course speaking) their mother's languages.
Although a baby has a head start on its mother's languages, as a newborn it can hear and distinguish every sound of every human language. It is ready to learn any language, although perhaps not with the ease with which it will learn the languages of its mother. Its brain gradually strengthens neural processes for the sounds of languages heard, at the expense of the sounds of other languages. By age 1, for instance, a Japanese baby has begun to lose the "l" and "r" distinction. As it grows, it will continue enhancing its ability to process the sounds of familiar langauges and losing its receptiveness to the sounds of strange languages.
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The earlier the better
Someone who learns only one language as a child has brain resources so specialized that, as a teenager, he or she can learn subsequent languages only slowly and imperfectly. There are exceptional adults who can continue to learn languages rapidly like children, but such people are rare.
The point is, to learn a foreign language, earliest is best. The luckiest babies are those whose mothers read and speak more than one language before giving birth, and who continue to use these languages after giving birth. Bilingual babies learn to speak a second language automatically and well.
I do not mean to say that children who begin a second language at a later age are completely denied the possibility of success. The effects of prenatal and infant learning are real, but not absolutely necessary. Many children who begin learning a foreign language as late as age 7 or 8 can still learn to speak with a native accent, but they will need to devote a great deal of effort to it (such as moving to a country where the language is spoken). Generally, children who begin after age 7 or 8 find it difficult to achieve nativelike fluency.
Children do not get confused when they are learning more than one language at the same time. The reason is that speaking a language involves resonating with its moods. People develop attractors (consistent mental patterns for combining sound and meaning) that are mutually entailed by language situations, so there is little confusion among situations or languages. We can make a similar statement about music. A person who knows well the music of Mozart and the Beatles can tune his or her mind to either without confusion from the other--and probably would think us strange for imagining any confusion.
These are facts of behavioral neurology. As a result, we can conclude that the earlier language learning is begun the more successfully it is accomplished. If schools took this conclusion to heart, they would begin foreign language classes with their youngest learners--the younger the better.
Some Japanese parents are concerned that their children will lose their Japanese identity if they learn English too early and too well. They need not worry. Rather, the opposite effect seems to occur: Japanese children who have attended an English immersion school develop a greater appreciation for Japan and Japanese culture than students who are raised in a standard Japanese curriculum, according to the doctorial research of Simon Downes at Tsukuba University.
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If they must begin late
Many young people do not begin to study a foreign language until they are teenagers. The practice of delaying foreign-language study until middle school is based on the old-fashioned belief that language learning is formal knowledge to be learned explicitly, like geometry. Moreover, even if they want to, schools would find it hard to make room for many hours of foreign language study in already busy primary-school curricula.
Because teenagers have a greater ability than children to learn abstract concepts, it is natural to supplement their efforts to gain fluency with some explicit instruction about the foreign language. But this learning of formal concepts should not be overdone. Ideally, explicit instruction about form would be offered only in the aid of communication. Otherwise, it is simply boring and leads to a permanent dislike of language study.
Learners need to build attractors for large and small aspects of a language: sounds, ｅxpressions, sentence patterns, for example. For Japanese people, important sounds in English include "uh," "l" and "r," both "th" sounds, and also "the loud-soft rhythms." "Grammatical" patterns such as subject-verb agreement and articles--a, an, and the--are almost impossible to learn as explicit knowledge, and must instead become patterns in the mind's ear. Sentence patterns and idiomatic ｅxpressions become automatic only after thousands of hours of practice.
Most of my high school and college students study for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) by studying grammar. They are surprised when I point out that, in the new computer-based TOEFL, the grammar part is only about 15 percent of the total score. I recommend that they go easy on grammar and study hard to get a feeling for the language. Even if they study no grammar at all and instead practice for the bigger parts of the TOEFL (about one-third reading, one-third listening, and 18 percent writing essays), their grammar scores will probably improve more than if they attacked grammar directly.
To develop a feeling for a language, a learner should memorize some written passages and songs to serve as models. Then the learner should do a lot of reading aloud. For this, simple material is just fine as long as he or she likes it. The point is to build patterns in the mind's ear that will serve in all situations and all aspects of a language.
A reader wrote me that attractor theory seems unremarkable because its implications for teaching are similar to what good teachers have always known. I take that as an encouraging comment. The previous widespread theory yielded almost nothing that supported the intuitive views of good teachers.
A situation in which theory is relevant to practice may at first seem strange to teachers who have learned to live by their wits. But this is how theory and practice should relate to each other. Attractor theory is no less scientifically solid than the previous theory, and if it seems sensible as well perhaps we can look forward to a period of closer collaboration between theory and practice.
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This series of columns is an attempt to reconcile views of language teachers, theorists and bureaucrats. Readers are invited to send e-mails to mrchilds@tokai.or.jp or letters to The Daily Yomiuri. The column will return on July 4. Childs, Ed.D., is a lecturer at Temple University Japan, Tokyo, and Fuji Phoenix College in Gotenba, Shizuoka Prefecture.