This has been my approach. So when I learn a language I spend most of my initial time just listening and reading and building up my words and phrases. I just want to get to know the language, enjoy its personality and get used to it. I do not want anyone to question me, or explain my love to me. I do not want to speak in the language before I hav e real y gotten to know the language, because I know that I wil not do justice to my love. I only speak in the language when I want to, when I am ready.
1. Resonance in language acquisition. The great imponderable.
Stephen Krashen is one of the leading proponents of the importance of input in language acquisition. Much traditional language teaching does not fol ow Krashen's ideas and suffers from a fundamental flaw. Too often teachers try to coax learners to produce the language, and to produce the language correctly, wel before learners have acquired enough vocabulary or familiarity with the language to be successful. This is counterproductive, because it creates a feeling of inadequacy in the learners' minds, and can cause feelings of frustration and resentment towards the language being studied. It is important to have a positive resonance between the language and the learner. Resonance is a positive response in our brains, cognitively and emotionally, to the messages and impulses that the new language is sending our way. There are at least four important ways to achieve positive resonance with a new language.
2. The resonance of interesting content.
If I enjoy the subject matter I am studying, I learn better. I feel immersed in the content, and therefore in the language. I remember words and phrases, as wel as the scenes and characters of what I am reading or listening to. The language comes alive and resonates. I can often remember where I was and what I was doing, when I was reading or listening to particular episodes of high resonance content.
3. The resonance of combining listening and reading.
The resonance of any learning material is greatly enhanced if I can both listen and read. I usual y listen to content before reading it. I sometimes listen while reading and I often listen repeatedly after reading.
4. The resonance of the culture.
In language learning, ?l’appetit vient en mangeant,? the appetite comes with eating. The more I learn a language, the more I get caught up in the culture and way of thinking of the language. I find myself responding to the culture, feeling the culture and participating in the culture. This is high value resonance.
5. The resonance of talking to the right person.
Where resonance real y comes into play is when we start to speak, when we final y have a chance to put into practice what we have learned. I always perform best when speaking with a high-resonance person. By that I mean a person whose use of language, intonation and voice suits me, turns me on, resonates with me. I pick up on the energy of such people, which releases the language within me. I find a rhythm and fluency that I cannot achieve with other people. I come away from such encounters energized, and the effect stays with me long after the conversation is over. A discussion with high-resonance speaking partners unlocks the language potential that I worked so hard to build up through my input activities.
Here are a few low-resonance learning situations for me, or learning situations that I dislike.
? Podcasts, or learning material, which begin with a lengthy musical introduction, or are interrupted by pop music, songs and the like.
? Songs are low resonance for me, because they are not word intense.
? Learning material that is artificial, where the text and voices are not natural.
? Audio content with English in it. Pimsleur and Michel Thomas are examples. On the other hand I find bilingual dictionaries much higher resonance than dictionaries which give explanations only in the target language.
? Speaking to a non-native speaker is lower resonance than speaking with a native speaker, and the poorer the language skil s of the non-native speaker the lower the resonance. That is part of what makes language classes low resonance.
CHAPTER III: INPUT AND CONTENT
Leading researchers on language acquisition like Stephen Krashen and Beniko Mason, to name only two, have shown that we learn best from input, and that relatively little is to be gained by a major emphasis on deliberate instruction, correction, or forcing output.
While I do not agree with al of Krashen's views, I think he is an important pioneer in the way he has chal enged language teaching orthodoxy. Let's start with his hypotheses.
Stephen Krashen is a proponent of input-based learning. Some of his principles of language learning are as fol ows.
1) Language acquisition (an unconscious process developed through using language meaningful y) is different from language learning (consciously learning or discovering rules about a language) and language acquisition is the only way competence (the tacit knowledge that underlies the language performance of a speaker of a language) in a second language occurs. (The acquisition/learning hypothesis)
2) Conscious learning operates only as a monitor or editor that checks or repairs the output of what has been acquired. (The monitor hypothesis)
3) Grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order and it does little good to try to learn them in another order.(The natural order hypothesis)
4) People acquire language best from messages that are just slightly beyond their current competence. (The input hypothesis)
5) The learner's emotional state can act as a filter that impedes or blocks input necessary to acquisition. (The affective filter hypothesis)
I am not sure about 3) above. Structures are so different in different languages that I wonder how the order can be predictable for al people regardless of their native language and regardless of their personality. What is clear to me is that we do not learn grammatical structures based on the teacher's agenda, nor on the agenda of any text book or teaching system. We gradual y get used to them, just as we gradual y get used to words, phrases and even sounds.
