Ex-Professor Reveals Way to REALLY Learn Languages (according to science)

most students still make the same mistakes even though they know the rule, obviously now there are trading programs, unfortunately most of the trading programs are not very good, you should focus on acquisition. Dr. Jeff Mcquillin is an expert in second language acquisition, which is the process by which we

learn

languages

. He now has a doctorate in Applied Linguistics and was a university

professor

for many years. Dr. Mcquillin also has decades of experience in understanding how we

learn

languages

, which will be very helpful to anyone looking to learn a language. new language right now Dr. mcquillin has published numerous articles related to language learning and now runs the ESL podcast for English learners.

He also blogs at backseat linguist tocom. In this interview, Jeff

reveals

how we learn languages ​​

according

to research and the big mistakes people make when it comes to learning grammar and vocabulary and also his advice for language learners. Enjoy Jeff, How Do Adults Learn? new lenguages? Well, adults learn new languages ​​in the same way that children, children, learn new languages. The same way we all learn the language we speak today, which is by understanding messages that seem a little cryptic, so let me break it down a bit. There are actually two ways your brain stores language, so to speak.

The first is what we call learning and learning is a conscious knowledge of the language, it is the knowledge of the rules i before e, except after C, in linguistics we generally try to distinguish or at least some of us try to distinguish between what is learning and what is called acquisition, learning is a conscious acquisition. subconscious or unconscious is the knowledge that you have in your brain even if you don't know it is there it is the knowledge that we tend to use most of the time during communication now the question is which of these is more important which of these should we focus on if Should we focus on learning or should we focus on acquisition and response I think, as I have already indicated, it should focus on acquiring the unconscious or subconscious knowledge of the language, your feeling for the language, the language that you know without even having to think. in it how we get good at learning everyone knows how to learn you take a book, you open it and you study the rules or you make your own flash cards or whatever acquisition comes from understanding messages, the brain acquires language when it can understand what is being communicated to you, let's take an example, let's say you are learning Spanish, you will have to find a situation where the language is presented to you in such a way. in a way that is understandable that is understandable for example uh if I started speaking in Spanish Spanish this Doos look Doos there are no rules there is no memorization there all you had to do was look at me and understand the language and if you understood it you started to acquire a little Spanish in those 20 seconds that I was speaking, what happens is that you take what you know and use it for what you don't understand, the language that you already understand or the visual language that everyone understands because you understand. the meaning of me raising my hands and talking about my hands, you take that knowledge and you apply it to what you don't know and that's how the brain understands things, so an adult learning independently, where do you start if you want reach the end?

Well, I've heard about this acquisition idea that sounds fantastic. Where do they start? Because obviously there's not always going to be a teacher who's willing to go through the acquisition process and say, "Man or or whatever." Where do you think someone should start with that kind of method? What I tell people is that, first of all, most people are trying to learn languages ​​that are popular, they are trying to learn French, Spanish or Chinese, and the reality is Now, fortunately, at least there are resources available, there are YouTube videos, people like you talking about how to acquire languages, obviously there are commercial programs, now unfortunately most commercial programs are not very good, they tend to focus.

In little bits of language that you're trying to memorize rather than giving you the kind of rich, understandable language that I demonstrated with my little monkey lesson, you should look for a teacher or a method or materials that you can understand. that give you tools to understand the language in addition to simply translating it. It's okay, there is nothing wrong with the translation. There's nothing wrong with using your first language to try to acquire a second language, but if most of the time you're just looking at word translations, that's not a very effective way. If you want something that is presented primarily in the language you are trying to acquire, you will want to start with materials that present you with visual information that helps you understand what the person is saying or, yes, what you say.

I'm reading, so it would be images that would be visual, that would be of someone speaking slowly and clearly, that seems like a trivial thing, right, but it's actually a very important thing. I tell people to look for a teacher who understands the importance of images and who speaks slowly. that speaks clearly that presents interesting stories a woman named Beno Mason in Japan who has developed this story listening approach she and teachers who follow her method stand in front of a blackboard or have pictures and explain the story a simple story in context From what we just said about this type of implicit learning and this acquisition, how does grammar fit into all of that? that the sentences are constructed when people talk about grammar generally refer to the conscious study of language and we return to the distinction I made before, which is the difference between learning conscious knowledge and acquiring unconscious knowledge.

Yes, you can study the syntax and yes, you will learn certain things. syntax rules the problem here is whether you can actually use it when you need it the grammar rule books only capture a small portion of what is actually our entire very complicated syntactic system but even more important let's say you are very bright and you memorize all those Rules are still not good enough because you also have to have time to use the rule and if you're in a conversation or even if you're reading a book to stop and say now wait a minute um it's that present progressive past progress, I use the imperfect here. or the above, since as humans our natural tendency is to focus on meaning, we are not as interested in how that message is interpreted, the brain does not multitask linguistically, it focuses on meaning or focusing on form You can backtrack quickly but you can't do both and if you try to focus on what linguists call focusing on how something you say is being communicated, you're not focusing on the meaning and the brain just naturally wants to focus on the meaning in its entirety.

Mostly when people talk about studying grammar, they're talking about trying to memorize rules and distinctions and here are the imperfects here are the irregular verbs and the antecedent of certain verbs in Spanish, that's all a waste of time you need to concentrate I just want to say that all of that will come to you that by the way brings up an important point that some people may object to saying well, I can, I can learn things and then it looks like I've acquired it. learning seems to turn into acquisition, that's not what we think happens in other words, just because you've studied something consciously and you

really

know those rules, it means that it's going to go into your acquired system, is there any benefit from um? actually studying the rules explicitly in terms of being able to say monitor my own speech when I speak Spanish for example, is there much benefit in that or should students just focus on acquisition and wait until they naturally acquire the rule without having to think explicitly in it uh this last one definitely uh I don't think there's much benefit in trying to monitor just because most people uh aren't very good monitors uh they're not able to mention that explicit knowledge, they don't have time, take the example of writing , okay, you would think that writing would be the ideal place where you could quote, use the term monitor correctly, the notion that you can take a rule and apply it directly in the moment. right place and you can fix it right before you're about to say something or before you're about to write something you can say wait a minute is that step oh that's pre boom I have ity I've used my conscious awareness right when writing when We've studied writing and explicit instruction, so you teach someone the rules of grammar, blah blah, and then you give them something to write on and then you say Okay, blah blah blah, go ahead and write that most students They keep making the same mistakes even if they know it.

The rule, even when you have time and know it, the hardest one to follow is actually to focus on form, which is why proofreading is such a difficult thing for most people because as you write something, you think it's perfect. , you give it to someone. otherwise and say Oops, 17 mistakes here, spelling mistakes or whatever is correct, that's before, before spell check, but you know what I'm talking about, proofreading is very difficult because we focus on the meaning, like this Don't waste your time trying. To become a good monitor, spend your time trying to be a good acquirer and get a lot of understandable information if my brain focuses on the meaning first, then someone talks to me in, say, Spanish.

I'm listening to what they're saying and my brain is automatically, implicitly, without me thinking about it, focusing on the meaning first of all, if then I want to think about trying to acquire those grammatical rules or I or acquire grammar, whether we say rules or whatever, um, yeah, and it's me. I am using content if I take it in a slightly different context if I am using content at what level should I ideally want to understand so that I don't just focus on the meaning but also have enough ability to acquire the form to be able to understand it well Do I have to have a higher level of understanding the meaning of things or will that just happen implicitly?

There is simply no way for you to know what the current status of your acquisition level is. It's a way of knowing how much you can understand. Now everyone has a different comfort level, but for me, if I understand 95% of what I read or hear, then I'm sure my acquisition system is my brain. I will be able to learn the grammar rules that I have when acquiring the job. I don't know what those grammar rules are. I certainly wouldn't try to focus on certain grammar rules, so don't worry, in other words, where you stand. that order, whether you have acquired this rule or that rule, you just get a lot of good and understandable messages that you can mostly understand now if you are reading or listening to something that you understand well 100% of you, you may still be acquiring even Even though you understand 100% of the vocabulary, there may still be grammatical aspects that you are acquiring or strengthening in your acquisition system, so I wouldn't say don't do that, but in general, as you progress, you want to discover that you want to listen and read. things that at least contain some information about the language that you don't know, but I wouldn't worry too much about that, you definitely need to keep trying, but for most people that's kind of a natural process as your fluency in the language improves , they start reading things that are closer to their native language and their language develops as a consequence of that interesting, okay, that's something reassuring and that as students we don't have to worry about that, you can just focus on the brain, it will solve well, that's good news for one of your favorite topics, potentially, I don't know if it's vocabulary or not, yeah, as students.

We need a lot of words if we are going to reach a real level in a language. What is the most effective way for us to improve our vocabulary? People's interest in vocabulary is good, it is understandable. A vocabulary that you will not be surprised to learn is acquired in exactly the same way that everything else is acquired in a language, that is, through understandable messages, through understanding the language that you read and listen to. The most efficient way to do it, as I have already done. The indicated thing, I think in the previous question, is to make sure you understand the messages that are at that high level of understanding.

You already understand 90, 95% of the words or even 98% of the words and can use them. that to discover the few words that you don't understand now, sometimes when I say well 98% you think that is very high, but what we do know is that as that percentage begins to decrease, you only understand 80% or 70%. You're going to have so much difficulty with the language that you won't have enough knowledge to understand the things you don't know, so we push, I always push people to

really

findthings that interest them. are comfortable with that, they can read or listen comfortably enough that the brain has a chance to pick out those little words that they don't know, let me say one more thing about vocabulary acquisition well, I could say that much more than vocabulary is acquires both eyes incidentally and incrementally, okay, we acquire vocabulary incidentally, by that I mean that we acquire vocabulary when we are not concerned with acquiring vocabulary, we acquire vocabulary as we read and understand messages nobody picks up a book and says: Today I am going to acquire more vocabulary in French, yes, no, you pick up a book and say: I want to read this story or I want to understand this topic, that's why you read, you are focused. about meaning, the position of the vocabulary stock is incidental, that is, it is an added benefit: you pick up those words unconsciously as you go along the second big point about vocabulary acquisition and this is one that people really need to understand and that I think the biggest problem is that vocabulary is acquired incrementally, meaning you usually pick up a little bit of the meaning each time you see it.

There were a number of studies done in the '70s, '80s, and '90s and that continued to be done, but the most important ones were done by a guy named Bill Nagi who was at the University of Illinois at the time in the 1980s and what Nagi discovered is that whenever you see a word you've never seen before, you usually choose to make sense of what that word is, maybe it's simply whether it's a noun or a verb, maybe it's something good or bad depending on the other. context of the story or what you're reading or what you're hearing, but every Every time you see that new word in a different context, you'll learn 10 15% more 10 15% more, it all adds up so that every time you see those words , you acquire that incremental knowledge to the point where you suddenly know the word unconsciously and you don't know how you learned it, I should say acquired it, the good thing is the words you really need to know by definition, you will see them more often, don't worry. about that weird word, it's not that important, what's important is that you have acquired a bit of knowledge even without realizing it and it is that incremental knowledge that you are acquiring as you read and listen that drives your language acquisition. in terms of vocabulary acquisition, that's where we get our knowledge from and it's difficult because you have to trust your brain, you have to trust your brain to select the meanings and put them into your unconscious system, so relax, this happens as long as you get understandable messages, so for those words, then I have to see them in context, um, of what you're saying and that way I'll get a percentage, whatever that percentage is.

It doesn't really matter, I'm understanding a little bit of that word each time. What about things like um? You know, if I think about it, practically in any beginner's textbook, there will be the first initial dialogues and there will be a list of vocabulary on the side and the translation of those words, if I try to consciously remember that vocabulary and then the translation that is at least the most accurate translation that we can, we can get at that time, how useful is that guy? of things because that's the kind of thing that people immediately go and say pop on a flash card without any context around it and then pretty quickly you'll just remember individual words, how useful it is, which is useful as you read. the dialogue maybe because now you can understand it, but generally speaking it's not very useful after that, if memorizing the vocabulary works, you could take a word, put it on your card, memorize it and then the next time you see it. boom, you will be able to use it, let's say you teach children 10 words and ask them to memorize them and then you give them something to read a reading passage or something in a book that contains those 10 words, the theory is because they memorize those words they will be able understand that reading better the reality is that they don't know, we know from studies with children and adults in first and second language studies conducted from the mid-1970s to the present that teaching vocabulary explicitly or trying to memorize words explicitly leads to one type of knowledge, as one person told me, is the type of knowledge that you cannot use, it is knowledge that does not actually improve your understanding, our learned knowledge is a very fragile unconscious.

The acquisition of knowledge tends to be much more permanent, so trying to memorize words produces a very superficial effect, what I call a surface effect, now that researchers understand it and that is why in the 1980s the instruction Vocabulary went from these types of memorized words to what's called Rico or deep instruction, but the problem with that is that it's also time-consuming, so it's not a very efficient use of your time. The other thing is if you search the internet and see other videos and God knows why. would you, I mean, you have Matt here, listen to what he says, but let's say you go out and you see someone say well, come on, um, you should, guys, you should be trying to memorize vocabulary lists and they give you a program uh anky or bilingual whatever and they say look, it's much faster, you're going to memorize all these words, that's not actually what the research shows, what the research shows is that to memorize a large group of words, I have to spend so much time time reviewing those words that if you had read and listened to them with the time you have dedicated to memorizing them you would have acquired more vocabulary.

The time efficiency argument is so against memorization and flashcards that it's ridiculous that other people who advocate flashcards aren't looking at the research properly, they're just looking at one study and saying, Hey, look, this one. group memorized 12 words in X minutes, wow, but what they don't realize is that next week. would have forgotten the 12 words or if they had spent time memorizing them over a period of, say, months, that time actually is if you took that time and instead simply had been listening and reading the understandable information you would have acquired even more . words, if you spend your time on flashcards, all you're going to get is vocabulary, whereas if you spend your time reading and listening, you're going to get vocabulary, you're going to get syntax, you're going to get morphology.

You're going to get knowledge, you're going to get all the other aspects of the language, whereas the flashcards give you one aspect of the language, yeah, fantastic, and that's one of those things that is not just the opportunity cost in terms of time spent, but it's also just Objectively, it's more fun to sit down and follow a story than it is to follow a story and that flashcards only work in theory if you do them regularly over a long period of time, which is fine, have a reading habit that you could, Yes, you know. read a lot more books and have a fantastic time while doing it, obviously, as long as you can find things at the right level and that's what I think certainly for me is just finding a way to get into a nice habit and that's how you're going to learning the language instead of uh, it shouldn't be something you have to force yourself to do because the sheer number of hours it takes to acquire a language you'll never get there if you do.

You're not enjoying what you're doing, it's just not going to work. Is it for students if you could give them advice on how to improve their language learning or learn in a way that, as we say, sustains them? It's sustainable and hopefully enjoyable, but also effective, what would you advise people? The one thing I think is most important, especially for a beginner, the language requires all of us to lower our expectations and the reason I say that is because it's very important. A piece of advice for anyone trying to learn something new, especially as an adult, because adults are very hard on themselves and think that they should go faster than they really can, for example, a lot of people say: Well, I wish I had started learning Spanish When I was 5 years old.

Children as young as one or three learn language so quickly. Nonsense, that's a complete myth. Children do not acquire language quickly. What happens is that our perception of children is different than our perception or expectations of ourselves as adults, so we think that children are learning language quickly, but in fact, when you go back and study children's acquisition, It is quite slow and the acquisition of the language is laborious, it takes time, if you set expectations that are not reasonable, you will become discouraged and stop doing it, so I think that the average person who wants to improve their language or learn a language, the first thing they should Being realistic is lowering your expectations, it takes time but the good news is we know how to do it, if you enjoy it enough you will continue to do it the way you want. to do it is by finding understandable information