Children don't know how to repeat.

I've written about it before - it's my firm and considered opinion that the idea of trying to learn "like a child" is contrary to all the evidence and completely counterscientific.

It's something that I used to believe in, although I thought it would only work in an intensive situation, and that trying to force it into a short format for night classes or as part of a high school curriculum was doomed to failure.  But that was before I studied language at university.  The magic of immersion is pretty alluring, right up until you see the cold hard facts behind it.
Now don't get me wrong, it's impossible to set up a large scale double-blind study on child-rearing, so most of the facts are more tepid and slightly crumbly than cold and hard, but they're maybe the best we're going to get.

What research there has been is pretty much ad hoc - all we really have is a series of case studies performed by (mostly female) academic linguists as they bring their own children up.  The main finding, as my university teachers told me, was that children cannot be corrected.  They showed us several transcriptions of attempted corrections by the mums, but the most common occurrance was for the children to repeat the same thing they'd just said, "error" and all.  Don't believe me?  Have a look at this video of a parent from YouTube...

Why can't this kid say banana?  Because he hasn't learnt the word yet.  Simple.  But surely he should be able to repeat it when he hears it...?

Well no, because he hasn't learnt the fundamental components of the word banana.  A word is not a fundamental unit -- it is composed of syllables built and combined within certain constraints that vary from language to language.  "Banana" happens to be a very unusual word in English, so the rules that govern its construction won't usually be learned until fairly late on.  The traditional conclusion is that a child cannot repeat something that they wouldn't produce spontaneously; that the child develops a "theory" of language which is constantly refined by input, and that every utterence is realised in accordance with this theoretical grammar.

But people kept telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about, because I don't have kids myself.  They have kids, and they corrected them.  Why does this sensation persist?

Well have a look at this talk by MIT researcher Deb Roy.  He's a machine intelligence researcher rather than a linguist, but trying to mimic natural language is a major theme in machine intelligence.


At 4:20 onwards we get to hear Deb's son slowly progress from "gaga" to "water".  Interestingly, you can see a period of instability - he doesn't switch immediately to "water" and seems to revert to "gaga" for a while.  If there is a perception among parents that children can be corrected, it may well be because there is a zone where the child's grammar accepts both possibilities, and at this point the child presumably can be corrected, because he can spontaneously use both the incorrect and correct forms.

He goes on to point out the patterns of parent-child interaction:

And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost preciselywith when each word was born -- word after word, systematically. So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself, my wife and our nanny -- were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. 

So the natural teaching process appears to occur as and when the child is ready for the language feature in question, without the caregiver ever knowing they're doing it.

The parent's perception of correction can most likely be explained thus:
The parent attempts correction frequently.
The child generally rejects the correction.
BUT
The child accepts the correction a rare few times, when they're in the unstable zone between the incorrect and the correct zone.
These few successful instances are more significant to the parent than the many unsuccessful instances, biasing the parent's memories.

Whatever, children learn whether we consciously try to teach them or not.
But children will not be able to repeat "what is your name" until they have learnt question word order, possession, "what" and "name".  An adult, however, will be able to parrot them without any access to the underlying concepts whatsoever.  A child can only learn these concepts and structures through exposure as this is our only "interface" with the infant brain, but we can get direct access to an adult brain through the language the adult already has.  It is pretty trivial to demonstrate that any successful adult learner does indeed think about a new language in the abstract, regardless of the medium of instruction: just ask them a question.

The adult learner attempting to "learn like a child" will be relying on higher-order reasoning, but the immersive environment does little to prepare the material for a higher-order approach. Conscious instruction, with native language input, gives the opportunity to do it right.

(Which is not to say that it guarantees to do it right, but that's a matter of methodology....)

Watching films as language study...

Well, I've been a little bit too technical and theoretical of late, so let's go for something more practical for a change.

A lot of people love the idea that you can learn a language just by watching films (such as Keith Lucas, discussed last week).  You can't.  Well, maybe there's one or two linguistic supermen out there who can, but for most of us, it won't work.

Can we get anything out of films?  Of course.
Can we get a lot out of films?  Hard to say.

First of all, if you're an absolute beginner, you're not going to understand anything watching the film without subtitles, and all proponents of target-language-only learning say that it's in understanding that we learn.

But unfortunately, once you start reading subtitles, you stop listening.  The brain, so I'm told, has only got one "language channel", and if you load it through the eyes, the brain tunes out the words hitting your ear so as not to mix up the two streams.  I'm sure you've tried talking to someone while reading or writing and found that you've written down a word from your conversation or suddenly said a word you've just read.

So once you start tuning out the sounds, your not going to learn much.

I first bought a DVD player in the January sales in 2005, with the express purpose of learning from foreign films.  My plan was quite typical: watch them with English subtitles, then later watch them again with the subtitles off.  Well, I never really did that -- I just kept buying and watching them with the subtitles on.  Not brilliant for my language skills, but now I've got one of the best DVD collections of anyone I know.  (Well, I know some people who have better collections, but at least mine's all originals!!)

However, after about a year, I started to notice little things at the start and end of sentences.  Little things like "you know...", "I see..." etc.  You know, little things that just seeped through before I started or after I finished reading the subtitles.  But I'm still only using one language channel.  People who can hold a conversation while reading a book aren't really doing two things at once, they're simply switching backwards and forwards between two tasks very rapidly, and this is what I started doing.  As a kid, I could never hold a conversation while reading, so it's not an innate talent on my part.  (My big sister always used to be able to do it.  I always assumed she was faking it or lying.)

Over the intervening years, I've been able to pick up more and more, but it seems to me that in a way I'm "primed" by the subtitles -- I'm anticipating how that would translate and what I hear is then matched against my expectations.

But really, the way to improve when you're good is to go without English subtitles (or whatever your native language is).  The first step to achieving that is to get material with target language subtitles.  The subtitles never match what is said on screen, so it's limited, but it does help you get tricky words.

Just now, I've been watching a French series Un Village Français. I tried watching it without the subtitles, but a few words slipped by me.  The first time I watched with subtitles on, I saw the word "scierie" and I realised it had to be "sawmill" ("scie" is "saw", and I knew the guy owns a sawmill from watching it before).  I'd watched two whole serieses without subtitles and never realised what this word was.  I hadn't even noticed that the word existed.  Two minutes with subtitles on, and I doubt I'll ever forget it.

But so far, so vague.
How did I start being able to listen while reading?  It's hard for me to say, as I wasn't really thinking about it at the time, but I believe it was when I started echoing my favourite actors to try and get the rhythm of the languages.  You can't do that without listening (obviously) and at first this got in the way of reading the subtitles and I ended up using the pause button a lot.  But having done that, it seems like my brain started realising that it had to listen and eventually I got there.

I only really noticed I was doing it when I went to see a French film and one of the characters was bemoaning the fact that kids today don't watch French cinema.  The subtitles talked about "rubbish from far away", the voice said "American crap".

But even after years, my "listening while reading" is still very limited.  It leaves me with a question I can't answer.  Do I get more out of watching with subtitles and hearing less of the speech or do I get more out of watching without subtitles and hearing more, even if I understand less?  It's impossible for me to measure this, and in the end the choice is made for me by circumstance, because if I have subtitles, I watch with subtitles.  If I don't, I watch without.

TV vs film for learners

But on a different tack, it's worth noting that watching serieses is far better for your language skills than watching films.  A film is relatively short, so there's little recycling of dialogue.  Each new film has potentially new accents and ways of speaking, but a 90 minute film finishes just as you're starting to get accustomed to the actors.

TV serieses, on the other had, offer several hours of dialogue written by the same scriptwriters, delivered by the same actors in the same accents, and covering the same topics.  The vocabulary and turn of phrase is repeated in throughout the length of the series, naturally reviewing and revising your learning. I've been following a particular series in Spanish for about two and a half years now, and I personally feel it has been immensely helpful to me.  Of course I've learnt a lot from other sources during the same time, but this has really aided my listening comprehension.

I already mentioned Un Village Français - I bought a two-series boxed set for around the cost of two full-priced feature films, and that's 10 hours of drama with 3 hours of historical documentary as bonus features for the price of 3 hours of film.  As I progressed through the series, I really did feel like I "tuned in" to the accents - there were things in the first few episodes that I should have understood (in terms of grammar and vocabulary, they were withing my boundaries) but that I didn't (because my ear wasn't picking up the detail of what the actors were saying).

So how do you make films and TV part of your learning strategy?

In the beginning, I don't think you really can.  At that stage, don't consider it "learning time", consider it "TV time".  Get used to the whole idea of subtitled foreign cinema with subtitles in your native language.  If you start to hear a word or two, great.  If you don't then it's no loss as this isn't "learning time".

I only really started getting serious with Spanish TV in the run up to my exams.  I'd studied a lot, I'd learnt a lot, but it still felt really disjoint.  I considered TV viewing as a type of revision -- I was hearing stuff I already knew, but used in many different ways.  I got used to the speed of natural speech in various accents, but I don't think I could have done that if I didn't already have a solid foundation in the grammar, because it reduced the amount of unknown material in the language.  In the end I picked up a couple of structural points too, and some good vocabulary, but mostly I mostly found that it took the language I knew in an academic context and made it more real and alive.

(And in the spirit of taking nobody's word for it and what I said in the follow-up, I'd like to point out that I can say definitively that I learned the Spanish construction "volver a hacer" from the Spanish series Águila Roja.  The fact that I can give a specific example suggests to me that I didn't learn much in this way.  Unfortunately, if you don't think about it, you can be misled into believing that remembering an example is proof of the effectiveness of a method.)

One thing I think would work well is to use a DVD player or computer video player that you can slow down.  I'd like to start watching foreign serieses with the first few episodes slowed by about 10 or 15% while I get used to the characters and their ways of speaking, then speed it up to normal speed for the rest of the series.  Unfortunately most of my serieses to date have been on-line without speed control, but I'll give it a go later in the year when I order in some French TV, and possibly Italian too.

Take nobody's word for it: a case study

So last week I gave a few reasons why you shouldn't pay too much attention to other people's advice.  Of course, you do have to pay some attention to other people's advice, so you have to evaluate the soundness of that advice.

A few weeks ago I was alerted to a perfect example of bad advice via a post on the How To Learn Any Language forums.

What makes this such a good example is the fact that the guy giving the advice has kept a blog, which allows us to critically evaluate what he says.

Keith Lucas believes you can learn a language just by watching TV.  This flies in the face of a lot of opinion, experience and most theoretical models of human language.

A month ago, Keith completed a 2000 hour "silent period" of Chinese.  That is to say that over the course of 2 years, he has watched 2000 hours of Chinese TV without looking up any grammar or vocabulary.  He will only now start to speak the language.

Keith's inspiration is the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) method.  ALG is in essence a variation on the Direct and Natural methods of the late 19th century, which suggests that we can only learn a language through that language itself.  I was talking about "one all-important concept" last week, or in Decoo's words "a concept that is stressed above all others" -- this is ALG's all-important concept.  Decoo says that this concept has to appeal to the imagination, and this certainly does appeal to the imagination.

The earliest post I can find on his blog referring to ALG is from October 2008, but it doesn't tell us how he discovered ALG and the exact nature of his experience with it.  He then went on to talk very enthusiastically about the principles of ALG in several more posts over the course of that month.

Then we get the leap of logic.  That very same month, inspired by ALG, he decided that he would try to replicate the ALG classes by watching internet TV.  Of course while the principle of ALG is learn a language through itself, in practice, ALG uses a structured course to introduce grammar and vocabulary in a controlled manner.  As such, simply watching TV doesn't approximate the ALG method at all.  Well, for the beginner at least.  A well-experienced ALG teacher has said that TV is only a replacement for ALG when you can understand 55-70% of the language to start off with.  To quote the article exactly: "If you are a complete beginner, it won’t work. The TV would just become more noise."

There is more to a method than the all-important concept!

Anyhow, so why does Keith seem to have succeeded?  Is he lying?  Is the rest of the world wrong?  What?

Well, the clues are scattered around his blog.  On the day he started his simulated ALG he said: "I'm no longer going to try".  "No longer", he says.  OK...

Then it gets interesting:
"As I have already learned a little bit of the language, I hear many of the words that I have learned. I am experiencing first-hand the crippling effect of my learning. Whenever I hear something familiar, the meaning just won't come. I have to associate it with the English and then I understand the meaning. There is some kind of barrier."
The implication in here is that the previous learning is a hindrance, rather than a help.

Keith seems to be denying the usefulness of his previous study, and it's a pretty common thing to do.  I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a review for course X, Y or Z that says "I learned more in 5 days with course X than in 5 years of school/evening classes/whatever".

It is impossible to go back and start from zero with a blank slate.  Everything you've studied previously has some effect, and it seems to me that most immersive courses and methods are most successful for false beginners.  In general, it seems to me that most courses are incomplete, and immersion fills in the gaps, filling in the need for meaningful practice that a lot of non-immersive courses fail to provide.

People will tend to ascribe their success to one thing, but in reality, their success is the cumulative effect of everything they've done.

But, in fact, Keith actually knows this himself.  In 2009 he wrote about how to write a language method, and in that post he says that on the internet "you can find many examples of what people are doing or what they think they did when they successfully learned a language".  Notice that "what they think they did" -- the tacit implication is that (as I said last week) we don't always know what we're doing.  But despite knowing this, despite knowing that people are never fully aware of their own actions and ways of working, he keeps slipping into making definitive statements about how things work and about what he does.  And to be fair, so do I, which is what the title of last week's post was all about!  Being aware of common human failings does not make us immune to them.

So a general request: when giving advice on learning, don't only tell people the stuff you think worked.  Tell them everything you did, and tell them which bits you think worked and which bits you think didn't work, but tell them that you can't be sure that you're right.  Then they can evaluate the whole thing critically and decide what they want to do for themselves.

Stone Soup (a folk tale)

A long time ago, there was a war between two kingdoms.  When the war was over, the surviving soldiers were all sent home.

Now, the soldiers had been given meagre rations, and many ran out of food on their way home and had to resort to hunting in the woods or begging, and many died of hunger before making it home.

There was a group of three soldiers heading home to the same town, and they had run out of food, when they came upon a village.  They knocked at every door in the village, but at every one they were told that there was no food.

With no other option, they went to the inn.

"Innkeeper," said the first soldier, "we have no food and have been walking for days."

"If you have money," said the innkeeper, "then I have plenty of food for you."

"Good sir," said the second soldier, "our army was defeated, and our wages taken as spoils of war, so we have no money."

"In that case," replied the innkeeper, "I can be of no help to you."

"But perhaps you still can," said the third soldier, "If you cannot offer us food, perhaps you would be so kind as to let us use one of your cauldrons today."

The innkeeper was perplexed.  If they had no food, why would they want a cauldron?  But he had a cauldron that he would not need that day, so he so no reason to object.   "Alright," he said, and led them to the store where his spare cauldron was.

The three soldiers carried the cauldron out into the village square and began building a fire underneath it.  The innkeeper, still perplexed, looked on as the soldiers drew water from the well to fill the cauldron.  "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the innkeeper, "why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

The soldier smiled, but said nothing. He took a small bag from his backpack, and opened it.  Inside were several stones.  He took each one in turn, examined it closely, and sniffed it.  Eventually he chose three and dropped them in the pot.  "Ah," he said, "these will make a good soup."

The innkeeper was stunned, and went back to his inn.

Shortly afterwards, another villager appeared. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"Ah," said the second soldier, "we are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!" cried the villager, "why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah no," said the soldier, "that is where you are wrong." He took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it.  "Yes, it's coming along quite nicely now."

The villager was intrigued, and wanted to try the soup, but he didn't say anything.

"But there's something missing," the soldier continued, "maybe a little salt and pepper."

The villager jumped in at this point.  "I have some salt and pepper at home.  I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed.  The villager ran off to fetch the salt and pepper, and the soldiers added it to the pot.

Another villager arrived. "What are they doing?" he asked the first villager.

"Ah," said the other, "they are making stone soup."

"Stone soup!  Why I have never heard such nonsense.  You cannot make soup from a stone!"

"Ah, well," said the first, "I'll tell you when I've tried it.  I swapped a little bit of salt and pepper for a whole bowl!"

One of the soldiers took a spoonful of the soup and tasted it.  "It's coming along quite nicely now.  But there's something missing," the soldier said, "maybe a bit of carrot."

The second villager jumped in at this point.  "I have some carrots at home.  I'll give you some in exchange for a bowl of your soup."

The soldiers looked at each other for a while, then eventually agreed.  The villager ran off to fetch the carrots, and the soldiers added them to the pot.

One by one more villagers arrived, and one by one they swapped something in exchange for a bowl of the miraculous stone soup: potatoes, barley, cabbage, celery, turnips, beans....  As the ingredients were added, the smell of the soup got better and better, until all the villagers wanted to try it, and swapped something for a bowl.  But eventually the cauldron was full, but only half of the villagers had given anything.

"Ah," said the first soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of cheese in my stone soup."

"You're right," said the second soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of salami in my stone soup."

"You're both right," said the third soldier, "it is ready.  But you know what?  I always like a bit of bread to soak up every last little bit of my stone soup."

Hearing this, the remaining villagers ran home, each returning with a lump of cheese, a salami or a loaf of bread to exchange for his own bowl of this incredible stone soup.

In the end, everyone in the village -- including the soldiers -- got a bowl of stone soup, with a lump of cheese and a slice of salami in it, and with a hunk of bread to soak up every last bit, and no-one was hungry.

THE END.

It's an old story that one, and it comes in various forms. Some are about beggars rather than soldiers.  Some have one instead of three.  Some have only one victim of the con, others say that this happened in every village.  Some paint the story as a lesson in cooperation, others just leave it as a pure and simple confidence trick.

But the moral of the story for the language learner is a little different. To go back to one of my favourite pieces on language learning, Wilfried Decoo's On the mortality of language learning methods, Decoo points out that:

A new method draws its originality and its force from a concept that is stressed above all others. Usually it is an easy to understand concept that speaks to the imagination.

...

 Typical is that such a single idea, which only represents a component, becomes the focal point as if being the total method. This publicity-rhetoric gives the impression of total reform, while often all that happens is a shift in accentuation, or the viewing from a different angle, because many common components remain included in each method.

In essence, Decoo's point is that a soup can be named after any of its ingredients, and many methods use the same ingredients, but simply name the method after a different ingredient.  A soup made of chicken, bacon, sweetcorn and potato can be called "chicken soup", "chicken and sweetcorn soup", "chicken and bacon soup", "potato and bacon" or any other combination.  It could even be something not directly related to any of the ingredients -- "townsville soup" or "Lord Such-and-such broth".

It is immediately obvious when you discuss language-learning with anyone that they start out with a single "most important" ingredient for their language soup.  But as the conversation continues, you will slowly find the other ingredients added to the pot.

The justifications for all these (essential) ingredients as "unimportant" don't tend to vary too much. The two killers are:

• "I do this, but everybody's different."  It's hard to declare that your method works without it if you've only tried it with it.  How can you know it's nonessential?
• "Its importance is overemphasised by everyone else."  This is no excuse.  You cannot assume that someone reading your advice has read all the material that overemphasises whatever point you're discussing.  Advice needs to be balanced in and of itself - you can't rely on external sources that the other party may or may not have read to provide the balance for you.

Now, I think Decoo has been a little too generous.  He assumes that the key idea in a method is a genuine ingredient in the language soup.

Me, I think that it's all too often the case that the core idea pushed is little more than the stone in your stone soup. Learning like a child is the biggest such stone.

What is "learning like a child"?

So let's cook a pot of "learning like a child" soup.

Recipe 1:

First step, a teacher walks into the room and greets you (good morning, good afternoon, good evening).

Silence.

Teacher greets you again and cups his hand to his ear to indicate he's waiting for you to say something. 

Class repeats the greeting.

Teacher congratulates the class (very good)

Teacher introduces himself.

He asks someone what his/her is name, then prompts the student with the needed answer structure, and congratulates the student afterwards.

This is repeated through the class.  If anyone gets it wrong, the teacher talks them through saying it right.

Recipe 2:

You shove the CDROM in the drive.

A picture comes up on-screen and a voice says "a boy". This is reinforced by the written word onscreen.

Another picture comes up and a voice says "a girl". This is also reinforced by the written word onscreen.

"Man" and "woman" are added in.

Then four pictures come up and one of "man", "woman", "boy", "girl" is said.  You click the corresponding picture.

But none of this matches the natural learning path of an infant.

How does a child really learn?

Infants sits listening for ages (from before birth) in order to work out what sounds have any meaning.  They know the whole phonetic makeup of a language before they even say their first words.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." in a different order.  After all, you can't ask an adult to spend 2 years listening to the language for every waking hour before starting to learn.

Infants cannot repeat.  They can only say something if they have learned the elements that the sentence is made up of.  Yet adults can repeat complex foreign phrases like "¿como te llamas?" (literally "what do you call yourself?") within minutes of starting.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." taking advantage of the differences in the adult brain and the child brain.

Infants produce utterances that they believe are grammatical, based on an incomplete knowledge of grammar.  It is only over the course of several years that the knowledge is filled in. In adult classes, we start off with the perfect grammar of those repeated sentences, and hopefully never say "me want choklit!"  So kids start with a fuzzy version of the full picture and slowly fill in the detail, whereas adults start with a detailed fragment of the full picture and add in further detailed fragments without a view of the whole picture.
So now we're learning "like a child, but..." avoiding the entire process of developing an internal model of grammar.

When the teacher comes in and says "good morning", we know what he means from our experience of social language in our mother tongue.  The same goes for "what is your name", "how do you do" and all those other social pleasantries.  And after being greeted with "good morning" and praised with "very good!", speakers of most languages are going to be able to tell you what "good" means in their language.  Kids simply don't learn that way!

When a teacher cups his hand to his ear, he gives us a known linguistic signal that he is waiting to hear something.  An infant wouldn't understand that!

And even if the infant did understand that, he or she would still not be able to repeat the full sentence.  Their brains just don't work that way.

The only thing that immersive techniques generally have in common with children's learning is the oral medium, which is a pretty flimsy link.

"Learning like a child" is nothing more than a stone in your language learning soup.

As it's almost the New Year, there's only one more thing to say:
Lang may yer lum reek.

Whither comprehensible input?

In an earlier post discussing expository and naturalistic language, I linked to this video from a talk given by Stephen Krashen, discussing comprehensible input (CI):


So what exactly is comprehensible input?  A very clever man once said that "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."  That man was Albert Einstein, and never has a truer word been spoken.

I have never, ever had a simple explanation of what comprehensible input is.  I have had trivial explanations, but while these are simple, they explain nothing.  So I decided to go to my friendly neighbourhood search engine and look for that elusive definition, and ended up back in YouTubeLand.

First up, here's a teacher's explanation of CI, from a resource pack for teachers of modern languages:


The first thing of note is when she says "Sometimes easier to say what it's not" -- this is an immediate warning that we're in the field of not understanding in Einstein's terms.  She then follows this up with a list of quite trivially obvious things that aren't good teaching practice (just like Krashen's first demonstration with German).  Anyone watching the video should already be familiar with the idea that talking at full speed to a beginner is a no-no in the language classroom, so why is this of such note when discussing CI in particular?

As she continues, she gives an example of what she has developed as CI and says that "most sentences are about 4, maybe 5 words long."  This is a very impoverished model of language, as she is therefore reduced to generating a series of independent declarative statements.  The real meat of any language comes in the textual metafunction -- how words change each other's meaning.  All those little connectors that compare, contrast and relate individual phrases by demonstrating cause and effect, simultaneity, sequence of events and all that stuff that allows simple facts to add meaning to each other (my recent post against rote learning demonstrated how I used various facts and consequences to learn the order of 4 of the US presidents).

Textual metafunctions are notoriously difficult to learn by induction from context and do appear to need genuine conscious teaching -- the TEFL methodology normally gets round this by defining them as inherently "advanced" and teaching them through target language several years down the line.  However, doing this actually makes it harder to engage with authentic native materials, and the process of "grading" texts becomes ever more important.  CI would appear to keep students away from native language, not get them closer.

Ok, so just before the one minute mark, she recommends that material is 80% comprehensible.  This sounds very scientific, but at no point has she described how to measure percentage comprehensibility.  I'm not sure where this 80% comes from, but I've heard it bandied about quite often, and I suspect it's just another generalisation from the Pareto Principle.  (80% has become something of a superstition for our times -- the Pareto Principle has gone from being an observation of general behaviour in systems, to being considered an immutable law for success...)  But in this case specifically, what does she mean?  Well the general claim is that the reader will be able to infer no more than 20% of the meaning from the context provided by the other 80%.  This is all well and good, but this is not a simple game of numbers -- certainly language features will provide useful context for working out others, but other features won't.  If CI is to work, you need to look at which features interact in this way to reveal useful information about unknown language.  Again, how to do this is never really explained in a discussion of CI.  (It is discussed at some length by academic linguists, who develop some very sophisticated maps of how certain language features reveal others, but this remains in the journals, and never makes it into language teacher training materials.)

Now, at just after 3:30, the presenter goes quite far off the rails, telling us that texts that are "dry and uninteresting" are not CI. The whole video was announced as being on the topic of comprehensible input, but now she starts talking about something entirely different -- student engagement.  This is a recurring problem in teaching methodologies -- a fairly simple idea covering a small part of the methodology is used to describe the whole methodology.  Student engagement is very important, but engagement doesn't increase the "comprehensibility" of a text, it just increases the chances that the student will put in the effort required in order to understand it.   Both of these two variables must be considered at all times, so it is not helpful to try to present them as a single item.

So, on we go, and here's another great example of Einstein's definition of not understanding.

The definition revealed on the slides between 0:50 and 1:00 is anything but clear.  In fact, it isn't even a "definition" at all in the most common usage of the term -- the second and third bullet points, presented as part of the definition, are sidenotes on particular issues.


As she expands, the definition becomes rather circular.  The first "characteristic of comprehensible input" that she defines is "understandable" (2:14), which is the Germanic synonym of the Latinate "comprehensible".  The fact that she doesn't stop there means that she is, like the woman in the previous video, expanding the term "comprehensible input" in directions it wasn't intended to go in.  But like the previous in the previous video, we quickly get a "what it's not", and again it's a trivially obviously bad way of teaching that she throws in.  It does not help define CI.

As she expands on "understandable", she hits a particular danger zone, asking that you teach "using as many cognates as possible."  In the TEFL world, that means using "arrive" when you really mean "get to" or "depart" when you mean "leave".  Target-language-only teaching justifies itself by saying that we need to learn how words are used -- grading language by the introduction of cognates actively teaches language that is not natural, and the natural tendency for Romance language speakers to overuse terms such as "arrive" is something that has to be actively combatted in class, not reinforced.

Yes, using cognates is good when they can be used naturally.  The example she gives is a good one -- English "important" vs Spanish "importante" -- but she presents no guidelines or advice on how and when to use cognates.

Like in the previous video, an unrelated variable is thrown into the mix -- the "affective filter".  Again, this is not part of comprehensible input and only serves to distract from the discussion on what CI is/isn't.  She then starts talking about repetition.  Again, I'm confused as to how this fits into CI.  Surely the point isn't about "repetition" in the rote sense, but the sense of having it come up in 7 different texts before production.  But if she means that, she should say so.

Then she moves on to "visuals".  This is quite insidious, because now that we've establish the notion that texts must be "comprehensible" as a sort of divine law, we can address the fact that it is impossible to make texts comprehensible.  So step by step we redefine what is and isn't the text.  We introduce the notion that including "visuals" makes the text understandable, when in reality we are using visuals because the text is not comprehensible.  Why is it that visuals make a text "comprehensible", but a native-language equivalent word doesn't?  The video gives us the normal line (3:33): connecting a "new vocabulary word" [sic] to a picture "they will remember it quicker rather than having to connect the word in their target language to the word in their native language and then [exasperated tone] finally to the image produced in their mind."  The idea is thus presented that an image is more closely tied to the mental model of a concept than a word, but any look at the nature of abstraction and iconicity will show that this idea is built on very shaky ground (I'll explore this in greater depth in a later blog post).

The visuals is then supported by something else that all CI advocates propose: body language.  Unfortunately body language is linguistic, meaning there is native body language, there is target body language, and there is something that is neither.  Classroom body language is normally a constructed language, and it is not the target language.  Suddenly the target-language-only classroom has grown a third language.  And the student must learn that as well as the intended target language.  At least if the native language was used there'd be no need to learn a third code.

I was particulary intrigued by the rather odd claim that unspecified "brain research" has somehow proven that we can only learn 7 new words per day.  It's patently absurd -- you cannot "learn" any words in 1 day -- learning only takes place over the longer term, and I have never seen any language course that doesn't use less than 7 words in lesson one -- it would be a boring lesson indeed!

The demonstration given a 5:45 was something I did not expect; to me, this is nothing more than an audiolingual drill, which demonstrates something quite important:  language teachers don't normally change their techniques to match what research proves is effective (or claims to, at least), but instead find ways to justify what they already do in terms of the new idea.  Recasting the idea of audiolingual substitution as comprehensible input is dead easy -- if you want "N+1 comprehensibility (a woolly favourite of the CI crowd) then what could be more natural than taking a known structure and simply adding a new word?

The next video is an extreme example of the same phenomenon.  It is an excerpt from a relatively old book-and-tape English course.

This is a really heavily behaviorist course, but someone has recently decided it's CI and relabled it as such for the purposes of the video. I don't believe it's what Krashen intended the term to mean, but it certainly fits the definition he and others provide.  There's a lot of repetition, there are visuals supporting the text, the text uses context to support the comprehension of new structures and vocabulary...

...so we must conclude that "comprehensible input" is an overbroad term that doesn't really define anything specific.

Finally, here's a video presented as an example of "comprehensible input".


The language used in general is highly expository and not particularly naturalistic. The visuals she uses do not support the learning of grammar, they only assist in the learning of very concrete terms, particularly proper nouns.  Does the Mexican flag assist us in understanding that she's talking about her family? No.  It only helps us understand "Mexico", which is probably where most of the class are from.

Now, note at 0:58 she gets the students to say something -- a single word: south. She then proceeds to go through a string of questions with very simple one-word answers.  The goal here isn't to get the students talking, it's merely to verify that they've understood.

And this is where CI theory falls flat: it is based on Krashen's idea that "language acquisition" is a matter of simply absorbing and absorbing a language until you know the full language, but the streets of any major city are full of immigrants who learn to understand the language of their new homes, but never learn to speak it with any particular degree of accuracy.

CI fails because it necessarily focuses on concrete vocabulary and on learning to understand.  But these are far, far easier to learn than functional vocabulary (modal verbs, linkers etc) and learning to produce.  More than that, these are the things that students can learn outside of the classroom.  Surely it's the teacher's job to teach the hard stuff, the stuff that the student can't learn independently, and then let them do the rest on their own?

Expository vs Naturalistic Language Examples

A couple of weeks ago, I was discussing authentic materials.  The main problem I identified was the lack of mutual reinforcement between individual texts (I hate that word, but I just can't find a suitable alternative...) meaning that very little language presented is retained.

So where did our modern love of "authentics" come from?

Authentic materials is actually one of the oldest tools in the language learner's toolbox.  Classical education has long focused on the reading of genuine Latin and Greek texts.  If you have a look at the Open University's course catalogue, you'll see that their classical language courses are called Reading Classical Greek and Reading Classical Latin, which is a pretty clear statement of the course goals.  The Greek course looks at a lot of literature in translation, but the Latin course is a perfect example of learning by authentic materials, as it looks at excerpts from Roman dramas and Cicero's speeches.

The use of authentic materials would even appear to go at the very least as far back as the heyday of the Roman Empire, where Greek was the fashionable language du jour.  Greek slaves were sold into rich Roman households where they would teach the children of the house to read and understand the works of writers such as Homer.

But despite two millenia as one of the most widely used tools in language learning, there are those who present the idea of using "real" language as a new and revolutionary idea.  In fact, many proponents of "real language" actively attack old ways of learning as ineffective and outdated.

But if we don't go straight for authentic material, what is there?

The very extreme opposite of authentic material is the stereotypical idea of trite sentences designed purely to demonstrate grammar points -- what I call expository language.

There are several classic examples of the absurdities that a purely expository approach leaves us with.

To the French person, the archetype is "My tailor is rich", which I'm told was the opening sentence of the original Assimil course.
In English, our traditional archetype is "La plume de ma tante" ("my aunt's pen", literally "the pen of my aunt") in such contrivances as "la plume de ma tante est sur le table".

Over a hundred years ago, people were already spending a lot of time attacking this approach.  The Danish language teacher Otto Jespersen wrote a book entitled How to Teach a Foreign Language (translated to English by Sophia Yhlen-Olsen Bertelsen) in which he put forth an argument for the so-called "direct" or "natural" method - ie that of teaching the language monolingually, by only speaking the target language.
"Disconnected words are but stones for bread;" he said, "one cannot say anything sensible with mere lists of words," and this is certainly true. "Indeed not even disconnected sentences ought to be used," he continued, "at all events, not in such a manner and to such an extent as in most books according to the old method," and while I wouldn't argue with this, we can see a little hint of what Decoo classes under the heading of "denigration of others" in his lecture On The Mortality of Language Learning Methods.

I'll reproduce some of Jespersen's examples, all taken from genuine courses of the time, for your benefit.
"My aunt is my mother's friend. My dear friend, you are speaking too rapidly. That is a good book. We are too old. This gentleman is quite sad. The boy has drowned many dogs."
Clearly there is no consistency or logic behind these, and it is hard to build up any sort of a bigger picture.

He then picks an example from a French book:
" Nous sommes a Paris, vous etes a Londres. Louise et Amelie, ou etes-vous? Nous avons trouvé la lettre sur la table. Avez-vous pris le livre ? Avons-nous eté a Berlin ? Amélie, vous etes triste. Louis, avez-vous vu Philippe? Sommes-nous a Londres ?"

And this is Jespersen's criticism of it:
"The speakers seem to have a strange sense of locality. First, they say that they themselves are in Paris, but the one (the ones?) that they are speaking with are in London (conversation by telephone?) ; then they cannot remember if they themselves have been in Berlin ; and at last they ask if they themselves are in London."

There is nothing in his criticism that really applies to any method, "old" or otherwise.  We are in fact looking at a criticism of choice of material.

I'd like to give a few examples that I think underline this point.

An Comunn Gaidhealach's Elementary Course of Gaelic was first published almost 100 years ago.  I picked up a reprint of the 1921 edition in a charity shop a couple of years back.  The first edition was written at the just after the high point of the "natural methods", and the revised edition was put together about 30 years after Jespersen's book, so it's quite likely that natural/direct thinking had an effect on both the original author and the author of the revised edition.  So let's have a look at some of the exercises in the book.

The first lesson has the following as a reading exercise (this is my translation of the original Gaelic)
The dog is at the door. The cat is on the floor. The swan is on the lake. The seal is on the rock. The man has a head. The cow and the bull are in the meadow.
There is a fort on the hill and there is a man in the fort. What is this? This is a hole. What is in the hole? There is a mouse in the hole. Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable. The boy is at the door with the cow....[etc]

This makes the mistake that Jespersen highlights of being disjointed and "jumping around" between subjects, but is certainly not as bad as his examples.  Jespersen's focus on the disjointedness misses the problems of the individual sentences. The author of the Gaelic book is trying to paint a picture, but he is writing expository text here -- his main goal is still to show the grammar, not to be natural.  Because of this, he ignores the problem of introducing new subjects with a definite article.  "The dog" and "the cat" are fine, because we are all acustomed to talking this way about family pets.  But "the swan" and "the seal" are more troublesome, as I'm likely to ask "which swan?"  The definite article assumes that we have a shared idea of a particular swan or seal.  We're more likely to say things like "there is a swan on the loch", as this doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the swan (I can now use the definite article, because I introduced the swan with "there is...").

The second paragraph is where this really starts to get troublesome, because we hit that old schoolboy motivation-killer: answer in sentences. "What is this? This is a hole." "Where is the foal? The foal is in the stable."  Point out to any teacher that natives don't answer in sentences and you'll get a simple and very logical answer: the reason for answering in sentences is to learn the grammar.  This is the very definition of expository language -- examples that exist purely to demonstrate a language point.

And here's where the "natural" and "direct" methods' justification starts to unravel.  When you're in a monolingual classroom, the simplest way to prompt a student to say something is by asking a question and demanding a fully formed response.  This means that your "natural" method is pretty much guaranteed to produce expository language and not naturalistic or authentic language.

"Answer in sentences" has pervaded language learning, and we see it not only in monolingual methods, but often the bilingual classroom will present new language with a native language explanation followed by monolingual practice.  Even methods using pure translation will often fall into this trap.  The original courses by Michel Thomas did not, but many of the courses written by others under the brand after his death do.  The Japanese course is a perfect example of expository language gone wrong.  The learner is asked to translate "do you want this?" and then "no, I want that."  Now there may not seem to be anything terribly wrong with this at first glance, but think about this: when I am talking to you, what is "this" to me is "that" to you.  This is even more problematic in Japanese, as it has a 3-way distinction equivalent to the Shakespearean "this" (near me), "that" (near you) and "yonder" (near neither of us).  The author is so fixated on the grammatical and lexical contrast between the two sentences that the physical logic of the dialogue is lost.  Again, the expository displaces the naturalistic, and the problem of meaningless and nonsensical language reappears.  Similar problems with here/there/yonder occur in almost all of the Pimsleur courses.  If you listen carefully, you'll often find yourself asking where the hotel is, only to be told it's "there", meaning where you are.

OK, so I have mostly given examples from bilingual courses or courses with explicit instruction.

One of the most vocal opponents of explicit instruction among the internet set is Stephen Kaufmann, Lingosteve on YouTube.  He is adamant that the only way to learn is by understanding bits of language.  He's put together a fairly sophisticated website dedicated to this idea, LingQ.  Kaufmann really hits that "denigration of others" that Decoo points out.  His whole argument is based on the same idea as Jespersen: he associates unnatural language with conscious methods.

But if we have a look at LingQ, will we find evidence of naturalistic or expository material?  Hmm....

Here's the first few lines of the first lesson in Portuguese (my translation):
"Welcome to LingQ.  My name is Mairo. What is your name? I live in Brazil. Where do you live? Do you want to learn Portuguese?..."

The conscious contrast between Mairo's personal information and his request for information from the learner is clearly expository.

And now an early Spanish lesson (again, my translation):
" Listen and repeat: What is your name? My name is Ana. What is his name? His name is Juan. What is her name? Her name is Maria. What age are you? I am 25 years old. What age is Juan? He is 22 years old. How old is Maria? She is 19 years old."
Here again we have clear expository goals: 1) question form vs statement form; 2) contrasting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations; 3) contrasting masculine and feminine pronouns in the 3rd person.

So even though we aren't going through any native-language instruction, we still get the problems that Jespersen was railing against.  The problem was not the medium of instruction, it was the material.

One form that is very widely used in both monolingual and translating courses is the dialogue.  Some of LingQ's texts are two-man podcasts.  Teach Yourself and Colloquial start each section with a dialog.  Assimil is based almost entirely on dialogues.  Dialogues often include the "answer in sentences" problem as described above, but not always.

The dialogue is said to give a natural context to the language, but sometimes this is assumed and the author ends up ignoring the naturalness of speech and produces a dialogue that is absurd almost to the point of meaninglessness, and becomes once more purely expository language.  This post was inspired by once such book: Beginner's Basque by Wim Jensen.  I can't say I was that hopeful when I picked it up -- it's by Hippocrene Books, who seem to specialise in cheap reprints -- but the first dialogue was worse than anything I have ever seen.  It comes with an English translation on the facing page, so I'll just use that (my comments are in italics.

Bernard: Good morning! I am Bernard. I am a boy. (Would anyone say this?  Certainly, the other person should be able to see that Bernard is a boy, so the effect is of someone with a learning disability.  Except that Bernard is not a boy.  The voice you here is of a man who would appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties.)
Johanna: Hello! I am Johanna. I am a girl. (Classic expository language -- using almost exactly the same structures with a word or two changed.  Again, the effect of learning difficulties comes through, and again, the voice actor is clearly an adult.)
Bernard: My name is Bernard. (Expository -- it restates known information needlessly, simply to demonstrate a different structure) I am Johanna's brother. (Woah there.  Who exactly is Bernard supposed to be talking to? I thought he was talking to Johanna, but there's no way he'd say this to her.)

Johanna: My name is Johanna. I am Bernard's sister. (Again we have an expository near-exact repetition, and again it really doesn't feel like Johanna's talking to Bernard.  Maybe they're introducing themselves to us?  Like a "piece to camera" in a video course?  It's not a particularly natural context though - it's what they call "breaking the fourth wall".)
Bernard: Johanna is a nice name. Your name is nice. (Nope, Bernard is clearly talking to Johanna.  But here again we have repeated information for contrast of structures, in this case attributive vs predicative adjectives.  Naturalisticness has been sacrificed again in favour of exposition.)
Johanna: Yes, it is nice, but Bernard is a nice name too. (And here we have a partial "answer in sentences" and more redundant echoing to demonstrate a particular form.)

Bernard: I am very glad. (??)
Johanna: See you!

This odd dynamic continues throughout the book.  The final dialogue in the book sees Johanna and Bernard discussing a family trip to the mountains.  From the dialogue, they clearly both know the plan, and take it in turns to say parts of it.  Who exactly are they presenting information to?  They are either saying things to each other they already know, or they're talking to you,

So really, dialogues are no kind of magic bullet.  Simply shifting your expository language into a dialogue does not automatically make it natural or meaningful.  Often it forces the author to be more consistent and coherent, but on the other hand, it can actually amplify the absurdity of some sentences by creating a clash between the expected behaviour in the context and the actual words of the participants.

But then we come to one of the most inexplicably popular figures in foreign language learning: Stephen Krashen.  Krashen was one of the big figures in the latest reincarnation of the direct/natural methods (and as Decoo says, in language, every method comes back again and again) and he was big on avoiding rules.  One of his justifications was getting people into "real" language "as soon as possible".  But as I said previously, supporters of authentic material allow it to be doctored and still call it authentic.  Krashen takes this self-deceit a fair bit further by that weaselly phrase "as soon as possible".  "As soon as possible" accepts that it's not possible right from the word go.  Have a quick look at a video of him in action, in a lecture he gave on his theories:

If you think about it, what did he start with?

He took a naturalistic piece of German and demonstrated that it wasn't an effective teaching strategy.  Then he presented a piece of very contrived expository language and called it "comprehensible input".  But it was not comprehensible.  Certain words and phrases were made very obvious, but you did not understand "what he said", but rather fragments of it.

So we go back to Jespersen's original argument -- that bilingual courses result in unnatural examples of the target language.  But monolingual courses are worse -- Krashen demonstrates quite aptly the opposite of his argument: that it is impossible to teach monolingually with natural language.  The one thing in favour of monolingual learning is that it does restrict the artificiality of the language -- the language must be unnatural to be understood, but it cannot be nonsensical or it will not be understood at all.

In that case, monolingual teaching is a bit of a crutch -- it gives us better results without having to fully address the problem.  But without these restrictions, and with a bit of brainpower, a bilingual course can do so much better.  It is extremely hard to elicit sentences like "do you know where it is?" and "I'm sorry, I didn't see you" in a monolingual classroom because of the non-specific function words, but these are extremely natural precisely because of those words; meanwhile they are actually very easy to prompt for by translation.  And once we're into function words, we move onto modality -- needs, desires etc.  These are very difficult to pick up from input, but in the Michel Thomas courses (the originals, not the potboilers produced posthumously), "wanting" appears 15 minutes into the course.  In Italian you'll be saying "I don't want to know", in German "What do you want to eat?" and in French "I would like to speak French". In the Spanish course it's actually held back until a full half hour into the course. *gasp*

Compare Krashen's demonstration with Thomas -- Krashen necessarily gives us easy words, because he relies on physical demonstration.  Thomas gives us words and structures that have vast conceptual meaning, but a very abstract, non-physical concept.  Krashen and his supporters would argue that because we are learning through translation, we are learning to translate.  Yet Krashen has never given any good demonstration of a reliable way to learn this very important functional language.  When it comes to grading authentics, it's the functional language that we generally need to remove to make it what he calls "comprehensible input", because it's inherently non-obvious.  If you want to get into native materials "as soon as possible", it's the non-obvious stuff that you need to teach/learn "as soon as possible".

So Jespersen is mostly wrong.  Yes, the worst examples of meaningless expository language could only occur in a bilingual course, but the cure is not to go monolingual, because only a bilingual translating course can employ genuinely natural language.