How can we best learn a foreign language?
What are the key factors for learning a second or foreign language successfully?
Well, learning a language, it looks as if it is something that everybody, or at least many people do, but it doesn’t mean that it is straightforward, and it depends on many factors. You learn a language to be able to communicate with other people who don’t speak your language, so you want to do that and you want to use it for your career, for your profession, so when you confront that language two things are needed: first, you have to want to learn that language (motivation is very important); and second, you need tools, and you need an aptitude. Sometimes people have real problems understanding other sounds or language, which means that you need help in that respect. As for motivation, you need to want to learn the language. So if there is motivation, and if you need help from your family, you have to look for it; if you need help from the teacher, you have to make sure that the teacher helps you, and if you have more problems than other individuals you need to look for help for those problems. You have to repeat the words more, you have to help yourself learning the vocabulary, learning the grammar. You need that, because it is not like learning a first language, it is not that it is going to come naturally, that you are going to capture it from the environment. You have to make a point of trying hard. Some things are going to come naturally, if the individual is in this case, it makes a big difference. When it is your first language, motivation doesn’t matter. Eventually you are going to get there, unless you have a real problem. But for a second language you really need, again: motivation, aptitude; and also formal instruction. It looks as though, with adults, whether it is fashionable or not, you need to be instructed. You may need more explanations, more formal instruction or more exposure to the language. But you cannot learn the language without that if you want to work with that language.
What kind of approach would match those requisites?
When you are going to learn a language: you are going to go either abroad or you’re going to learn it in your country, and you are in a classroom, and you are either the teacher or a student. So you have to go two ways: you have to practice as much as possible in a natural environment and if you have friends who speak the language, you make sure you practice. An important component of learning a language that is that you live in the language. Therefore if you are a parent and you can send your children abroad, you should do so, because that will be an experience that will last forever. But before that, even before going abroad, I would make sure that there is an X amount of months of instruction, because, in terms of time and efficiency, that is going to be much more productive. The person is going to be exposed formally to the structure of the language, and that is going to help when you get to be immersed in the language, because you already have an idea of where to put the words in terms of whether there are differences in the way the words are organized in the two languages. That can come from instruction. So, when it comes to instruction, it doesn’t mean that the teacher has to teach you actual rules, the rules that linguists come up with to account for how languages work, but there are different ways of talking about how languages work. So, they can give you examples, they can joke with you, they can help you to play with the words of the language, you can even use your first language to compare the two. I don’t see any problem in using Spanish, if you are teaching English as a second language. Spanish mistakes that are really something that you will capture immediately can be used to teach you what is possible in English and what is not possible so that eventually you get to have the same intuitions as native speakers of the language have. This is what I always say, if we can lead learners of Spanish to have the same intuitions as the native speaker has (native speakers may not be able to provide an explanation of why but they know whether or not a given construction is grammatical, possible, acceptable in their mother tongue), it would be ideal. In fact, that should be the ideal for learners and for teachers, because sometimes there are teachers who are not native speakers of the language they teach and they have to be trained. Training them is very important so that they can know why a student is making a mistake, if you want to call it a mistake… you can also call it a “non-native structure”. Ideally, you want to lead teachers to have native speaker intuitions… and if some subtle structures or principles are difficult to grasp, you want to make sure that teachers have metalinguistic abilities that allow them to help learners to produce and understand the target language with native-like competence.
