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I'm gonna pushing your parameter insomnia. How do we acquire language? And I'd like to begin this discussion to this presentation with an outrageous statement.

In my opinion, we all acquire language the same way. The reason this is an outrageous thing to say is that these days in education, we're living in an age of individual variation.

We're very concerned about how our students are different, not how our students are the same.

All those who've been around in the field for a while remember, oh, about 15, 20 years ago, people were very concerned about something called field dependent learners and field independent learners.

You give people a certain test and one group gets this treatment, one group gets the other.

Then about 15 years ago, it was left side of the brain, right side of the brain. So people are left hemisphere thinkers, some people are right hemisphere.

Then about 10 years ago, cognitive style, the cognitive style, the home culture differs from the cognitive style of the school culture, we have a clash, etc. Well, each of the examples I gave you is probably correct.

There is individual variation and there is quite a bit of it.

Nevertheless, there are some things all do the same. Let me give you some examples. Digestion, we all digest food the same, no significant individual variation.

First, you put it in your mouth, then you chew it up, then it goes down your throat, then into your stomach. That's how it's done everywhere. That's how it's done in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa.

That's how it's done everywhere in the world. The visual system is the same everywhere.

It's always the occipital lobe in the back of the brain. It's never in the side of the brain, it's never in the front of the brain, it's never in the elbow.

It's done exactly the same everywhere you go. We all acquire language the same, and rather than just talk about it, I'd like to show you.

I'd like to take just a couple of minutes and give you some sample language lessons. I'll use a language that I'm sure you've heard before and maybe some of you speak and you can tell me which of these two very brief lessons you like better.

Here's lesson number one, the vet against unfuckin Deutsch - Hammond won't if Merton Faro saggin does not my name item.

Deutsche ist Nazaire sure know waka on eco fur does the Allah's feel at home mid to H hub in Vietnam what do you think good lesson so far do you think if I kept talking to you like that you'd pick up German not very likely how about if I repeated it would that help probably not how about if I said it louder would that help probably not how about if I said it and you repeated it back again I don't think that would help how about if I wrote it out for you and you could see it on your television screen that wouldn't help either how about if I wrote it out for you and you copied it down how about if I wrote it out for you and deleted every fifth word and you tried to guess what the word is the truth is that none of these things that none of these things help none of these things mean anything and I hope you can see that now here's lesson number two and for this you have to watch me carefully thus is mine a hunt first NZ does hunt everyone say yeah I can hear you even though the TV audience good huh that's his main Cup Lindsey cope via good from here I'll draw a picture hope it's good yeah sure hope this is Mr. Spock yeah Mr. Spock hot spy orin orin 14z Oren it had sly Oren okay Mr. Spock yeah sure okay Alden Stanzi algún algún we filled out the client's dry dry algún try out is that lipstick dry algún nein they're having a dry outcome once which doesn't want okay here's that cigarette oh yeah nice cigarette is it nice good if you understood.

Lesson number two, not every word, but more or less. I did everything necessary to teach you German, and now I'm going to share with you the most important thing I have learned about language, probably the best-kept secret in the profession.

We acquire language in one way and only one way, when we understand messages.

We call this comprehensible input. We acquire language when we understand what people tell us, not how they say it, but what they say, or when we understand what they, what we read.

Comprehensible input, in my opinion, has been the last resort of the language teaching profession. We've tried everything else.

We've tried grammar, teaching drills and exercises, computers, etc. But the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand, comprehensible input.

Now, one of the reasons lesson number two was better than lesson number one is we had Mr. Spock to help us out. So anything that helps make input comprehensible, pictures, knowledge of the world, realia, etc., helps language acquisition.

If comprehensible input is true, what we call the input hypothesis is true, other things follow from it.

And very important corollary, the input hypothesis is this, and this may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, certainly came as a surprise to me.

Talking is not practicing. Talking is not practicing. What does this mean? Means if you want to improve your Spanish, it will not help you to speak Spanish out loud in the car as you drive to work in the morning.

It will not help you to go to the bathroom, close the door, and speak Spanish to the mirror.

I used to think those things helped. Now I think they don't.

On the other hand, if we were in German class and we could hang together for a couple of weeks, say an hour a day, of German and I could keep the input light and lively as in the second example, you'd start to acquire German.

It would come on its own and eventually you'd start to talk, your speaking ability would emerge gradually.

Now, we have a lot of evidence that this is true, and the evidence is in the professional literature, in books and journal papers, etc. And if you're an insomniac, you're welcome to look at all that, but rather than go through that, I'd like instead to tell you a story that illustrates the same point.

I've used the story for a long time, so those who have heard it before, I've been using this for about 15 years, and the reason I've keep staying with it is that it makes the point very well and I've decided it's I've discovered it's just about a universal experience.

What has happened to me has certainly happened to you. And bear in mind, if you've heard it before and you're tired of hearing it, think how I feel.

My experience took place in 1974 when I was briefly living in exile from California, working at the City University of New York at Queens College as director of English as a second language.

And like everyone else in New York, we lived in a big apartment building, and the apartment next door to us was owned by a Japanese company, and every year there'd be a new family in the apartment, and every year there were the children who couldn't speak English, and there I was, director of English as a Second Language.

I will teach English to these children and brag about it to my friends. So I remember going up to the little girl next door.

She was four years old, her name was Ito me and I didn't know about This Tyrell a language acquisition, then nobody did.

And I thought, then the way you get people to acquire language is you get them to practice talking. So I try to get her to talk.

I'd say, yeah, you told me, talk to me. Say good morning, say hi. No response. Well, clearly I decided I've got to make this more concrete.

He told me, say ball. No response. Well, obviously, I've got to break it down to it into its component parts.

Let's work on initial consonants. Say ba, look at my lips. Again, no response. There's a theory going around then that a lot of people still believe that children don't really want to acquire language.

You have to kind of force it out of them. So I tried that.

I won't give you the ball until you say ball. That didn't work either. No matter what I said, he told me wouldn't speak.

She didn't say anything the first week, she didn't say anything the second week, the first month, the second month, five months until she started to speak.

Actually, that's not entirely true. Children during this stage do pick up certain expressions from the other children in the neighborhood. There is not real language.

They are, they understand approximately what they mean. It's not, again, it's not real language. They have a rough idea what it means.

They use it in roughly appropriate situations, things like, leave me alone, get out of here. In fact, one child I knew, the only thing could say was, I kick your ass, said it everywhere, wasn't quite sure what it meant.

After about five months, he told me started to speak and several things were interesting about her language.

First, it looked a lot like first language acquisition, the same process our children went through one word, two words, gradually getting more complicated.

Second, it came quickly. By the time Ito, me, and her family went back to Japan at the end of the year, her English was closing in on the way the other children in the neighborhood were talking.

The question is, this, what was going on during those five months.

She was listening, she was picking out comprehensible input. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition.

Let me repeat that. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition, it was the result of all the comprehensible input she had gotten over those five months.

Now, a silent period for a child in a situation like this is not pathological, it's normal. It's what you expect.

He'd like to have a silent period, wouldn't you? How would it be if he had to study another language, but he went to a class where you didn't have to say anything?

Doesn't that sound wonderful? You can talk all you want, you can raise your hand, you can volunteer, but no one's going to call on you, no one's going to put you on the spot.

Also, in this perfect class, if the input is incomprehensible, it's the teacher's fault, not yours. That's how we're doing it now, and the results we're getting aren't a little better than other methods, they're actually much, much better.

Before I leave this topic, let me put in a brief commercial message for speaking.

I'm not opposed to speaking. I think when students speak, it's fine, but what counts and speaking is not what you say, but what the other person says to you.

In other words, when you get involved in conversation, what counts is the input that you can stimulate from other people.

So I'm in favor of student speaking, but we have to understand it makes an indirect, a helpful but indirect contribution to language acquisition. I'd like to discuss one more hypothesis before we move on to literacy, and this is a very important one called the affective filter hypothesis.

Our research in language acquisition has concluded that there are several factors that are related to success in language acquisition, and I'm going to list them here on your screen.

One factor is motivation. Students who are more motivated do better in language acquisition. Those of you who study this know that it's a little more complicated than this, but this is a good approximation.

Second, self-esteem, probably the dominant concept today in popular psychology.

Students with more self-esteem, more self-confidence do better in language acquisition. Third, anxiety, and here the correlations are negative: the lower the anxiety, the better the language acquisition.

In fact, my hypothesis is for language acquisition to really succeed, anxiety should be zero. Has this happened to you? Have you ever been in a situation speaking a language that you may not speak very well, when the conversation gets so interesting, you temporarily forget that you're using another language?

If this is happening to you, that's when you're acquiring, when your focus is completely on the message, what the other person is saying, and your anxiety is temporarily gone.

By the way, is an important footnote to this. I guess today we say sidebar as a sidebar to all this, I'm not sure that zero anxiety is right for everything.

I'm sure it's good for a lot of things, but I'm not quite sure how far to push this, speaking to you as a college teacher, speaking to you as a parent.

I think there are certain things in school children absolutely must learn. I think my students at the University of Southern California should suffer. We have hard classes, tough requirements.

You don't do the work, you're out. I finally learned what they tried to teach us in educational psychology.

The amount of drive or anxiety necessary to accomplish a task depends on the task. Sometimes we call facilitative anxiety, is okay. I don't believe in torture, but sometimes a little anxiety is okay.

Language acquisition though is different. For language acquisition to succeed, anxiety has to be directed somewhere else, not at the language.

Frank Smith puts it this way, for the child to develop literacy, the child has to assume that she's going to be successful. The way we integrate this into the theory is like this, if a student isn't motivated, if self-esteem is low, if anxiety is high, if the student is on the defensive, if the student thinks the language class is a place where his weaknesses will be revealed, he may understand the input, but it won't penetrate.

It won't reach those parts of the brain that do language acquisition. A block keeps it out. We call this block the effective filter.

Here's how it works. Somewhere in the brain, Chomsky tells us, is a language acquisition device. Our job is to get input into the device.

So that's input here, low motivation, low self-esteem, high anxiety, the block goes up, the filter goes up and the input cannot get in.

This explains how it can be that we can have two children in the same class, both getting comprehensible input.

One makes progress, the other doesn't. One is open to the input, the other's closed. Let me now try to summarize everything I've said in the last 10-15 minutes or so, and I'll summarize it in one sentence and we'll wonder why it took me that long.

We acquire language in one way and only one way: when we get comprehensible input in a low anxiety environment.

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러닝그라운드

🗣️ The Key to Language Acquisition: Comprehensible Input

The speaker opens by challenging the modern educational focus on individual variation, arguing that **we all acquire language in the same fundamental way**. He uses the analogy of digestion and the visual system to illustrate universal processes.

He contrasts two German lessons. The first is incomprehensible, demonstrating that **rote memorization, repetition, and even writing out the words are ineffective without understanding**.

The second lesson uses visuals and context to make the language understandable. The speaker emphasizes that **language acquisition occurs when we understand messages**, calling this "comprehensible input."

👂 Input Over Output: Why Listening Matters More Than Talking

A crucial point is made: **"talking is not practicing."** The speaker argues that simply speaking a language aloud, without meaningful input, is not effective for acquisition. Instead, focusing on understanding spoken or written language is key.

He shares a story about trying to teach English to a young Japanese girl, Ito me. Despite his efforts to get her to speak, she remained silent for five months. This "silent period" was followed by rapid language acquisition, proving that **listening and internalizing comprehensible input precedes and enables speaking**.

The speaker clarifies that while speaking is not the primary driver of language acquisition, it's still valuable because **it stimulates input from others in a conversation**. This input is what ultimately contributes to language learning.

😌 The Affective Filter: How Emotions Impact Learning

The speaker introduces the "affective filter hypothesis," explaining that **motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety significantly impact language acquisition**. Low motivation, low self-esteem, and high anxiety can block comprehensible input from reaching the language acquisition device in the brain.

He emphasizes that **for successful language acquisition, anxiety should be minimized**, allowing the learner to focus on the message rather than the stress of using a new language.

The presentation concludes with a concise summary: **"We acquire language in one way, and only one way, when we get comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment."**

The speaker claims that everyone acquires language in the same way, contrasting with the current educational focus on individual differences.

Analogies are drawn with digestion and the visual system to illustrate universal processes.

Demonstration of Effective Language Teaching

A first ineffective German lesson is presented, involving repetition, volume increase, writing, and copying, none of which aid understanding.

A second, more effective lesson uses visuals and context to aid comprehension.

Language acquisition occurs when we understand messages (comprehensible input), not how they are delivered.

Pictures, knowledge, and realia enhance comprehensibility and aid acquisition.

Speaking is not practicing; language acquisition occurs through understanding input, and speaking ability emerges gradually.

The speaker shares a story about trying to teach English to a young Japanese girl named Ito me, using traditional methods that proved ineffective.

After a silent period of five months, Ito me began to speak, demonstrating a natural language acquisition process similar to first language acquisition.

Ito me's speaking was the result of comprehensible input she received during her silent period.

Motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety affect language acquisition. Lower anxiety promotes better acquisition.

If a student is unmotivated, has low self-esteem, or high anxiety, the input may not reach the language acquisition device in the brain due to an affective filter.

The affective filter blocks comprehensible input from reaching the language acquisition device.

Language is acquired through comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment.

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