Once we have decided that the goal is fluency or communicative competence, we have to decide what method best helps us accomplish that goal. To answer that question, we need to know something about both Second Language Acquisition and how the brain works. Some of the things we know include the following:
- 1. The brain craves meaning and will create it even where there is none.
- 2. Conscious Working Memory can hold only +/- 7 things at a time; beyond that, something has to be discarded or sensory overload occurs; the unconscious mind, however, can hold a seemingly limitless number of items.
- 3. “Chunking” allows the brain to keep more than 7 discrete items in active memory because the chunked items become a single entity in the brain.
- 4. The brain needs repetition – and lots of it – to move things from conscious, short-term memory to long-term memory; some people call this movement to long-term memory ”acquisition”.
- 5. The brain craves novelty, which seemingly works against #4, but in fact complements it.
- 6. Listening/Speaking are very different skills from Reading/Writing.
- 7. Spontaneous language production is primarily acoustic. This is evidenced by speech communities where language forms diverge from the standard language; for example, in Spanish there are regions of “leismo” or “loismo”, where the object pronoun is used “improperly” according to the rules of grammar. Speakers from these regions can often think about the rule and produce the correct pronoun, but when they speak spontaneously they revert to what sounds “right” to them.
- 8. Too much stress impedes brain performance in all areas – including comprehending a language.
- 9. Learners retain grammar rules better and apply them more adeptly when they learn them after manipulating the language rather than before. This has been shown through studies, some of which have been published in Foreign Language Annals from AATG.
- 10. Because the brain seeks meaning and needs repetition, meaningful repetition is key to acquisition (or transition to long-term memory).
- 11. The more personally engaging and vivid an experience is, the more quickly it moves to long-term memory.
All of these play a role in language acquisition, particularly in the classroom.
One caveat before proceeding:
No method will produce “native-speaker fluency” as that phrase is normally understood in the amount of time that we have with students in the high school setting.
Why is Grammar-Translation, or the more modern version of grammar-based instruction, not the best method for achieving speaking fluency?
- 1. From its inception, speaking fluency was not even its goal.
- 2. There is insufficient aural/acoustic exposure to the language.
- 3. There is overreliance on Active Working (short-term) Memory, which often leads to cognitive overload for the learner.
- 4. The result of cognitive overload is stress, which further impedes brain function.
- 5. There is insufficient meaningful repetition.
- 6. There is overreliance on reading and writing, which are different skills from listening and speaking.
- 7. The method uses the less-effective sequence of learning a rule and then manipulating the language rather acquiring the structure through exposure and manipulation before learning the rule.
- 8. The method usually relies on less personally engaging and vivid presentations of language.
Why is the Audio-Lingual Method not the best method for achieving speaking fluency, even though that is its goal? It is based on Behaviorism. In relation to language, Behaviorism postulates that language is a set of habits that can be acquired through conditioning. This belief led to the strong reliance on repetition and substitution drills. Unfortunately for the method, this is not the way the brain works.
- 1. According to Behaviorist theory, the learner should produce only what has been conditioned, but studies show learners create unconditioned language.
- 2. The substitution drills are not meaningful.
- 3. The substitution drills are not engaging.
- 4. The substitution drills can be performed without attention to meaning.
- 5. The mind attends to meaning and acquires form with it but does not acquire meaning from attention to form.
Why is immersion not the best method for achieving speaking fluency? It is, after all the way we learned out first language. While immersion does work, it is not best for the classroom because
- 1. The Comprehensible Input is accompanied by overwhelming amounts of Incomprehensible Input.
- 2. Large amounts of Incomprehensible Input lead to disengagement by school students, who are often unmotivated to begin with.
- 3. Constructing Meaning often takes so long that the necessary meaningful repetitions do not take place.
- 4. It requires students in an artificial setting (the classroom) to endure unbearable amounts of mere “noise” when they do not have an overwhelming desire or necessity to acquire the language. In a target-language country and culture, immersion works well because of the amount of time available (24 hours a day) to achieve the necessary meaningful repetitions. The motivation is also present to a degree not found in most American schools.
Next, we’ll look at Teaching with Comprehensible Input and why it is the best method to date for accomplishing the goal of speaking (and reading) fluency.