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Chapter 1. Introduction
Languages are big. They are complicated too. But brains are good at learning them, provided they are given the chance. A child learning a second language is often given the chance for his or her brain to do what it needs to do. The brain of an adult often gets less than it needs, because the world of adults is different from the world of children. In addition, adults are commonly under time pressure, and have a psychological need to observe clear and steady progress.
It is often said that children learn languages from their environment. They get into an environment where language learning can happen, and language learning happens. What I have to say here is about creating an environment where language learning can start happening for an adult. These are suggestions for beginners, ideally, for people who are just about to begin learning a new language. I'm especially concerned to help people who have to, or wish to, learn a language on their own, in the location where it is spoken, without the advantages and disadvantages of a formal language course. The techniques I will suggest will be especially helpful during the first two months of language learning. Eventually, other approaches will be needed. Even if you start out employing the techniques I suggest, you may end up modifying them, or inventing new techniques of your own. Think of this as one way to learn a lot of language in a short time.
1.1 What is a beginning language learner trying to do?
If we ignore a whole bunch of problems, we can say that a language learner faces two main problems. The first is to get started. The second is to keep from stopping. We are focusing here on the first of these problems. You may intend to become an outstanding speaker of your new language one day. Your first problem is to become any kind of speaker, period. First you must go from being a total non-speaker to being a struggling speaker. Then you can go from being a struggling speaker to being a comfortable speaker. Way down the road, if things work out, you may come to speak the new language almost as easily as you speak your mother tongue. Right now, you'd be happy with a lot less than that. When you can basically get along in the language, given enough effort on your part and enough cooperation on the part of the person who you are talking to, you will be a "basic speaker" of your new language.
You are entitled to call yourself a basic speaker of the new language when you meet two conditions. First, your ability to understand the language (commonly referred to as comprehension ability) is adequate so that a typical speaker of the language can always get her point across to you, given a bit of effort, and provided the topic is fairly mundane. Second, your ability to speak the language is such that you can always get your point across to other people, given a bit of cooperation, and provided the topic is mundane.
Get the picture? You and a typical speaker of the language work together cooperatively to make communication successful. It is hard work for both of you, but you usually succeed. A mundane topic is any topic involving ordinary concrete experience, but not including things like philosophy, theology, and punctuated equilibria. The cooperative effort between a fluent speaker and a new speaker is called the negotiation of meaning. A lot of the burden falls on the fluent speaker to make this communication successful. The fluent speaker must simplify her speech, and speak slowly and clearly, and help you to find the words you are groping for. Both of you often will need to guess at what the other is saying, or meaning to say.
We now have an idea of your first target: to be a basic speaker, able to negotiate meaning with a cooperative conversational partner. So that's what I want to help you do--to go from being unable to speak this language at all to being able to negotiate meaning with a cooperative native speaker.
And when I say speak, I really do mean speak. A tape recorder can't speak. Neither can a parrot, in the sense I have in mind. By "speak a language", I mean that you can start with an idea that you want to get across, and go on to express that idea in words that someone else can understand. In addition, you will often understand what they say in response, or at least the gist of it, and if you don't understand, you can work with them conversationally until you get the point they are trying to make.
You may have had experiences attempting to learn other languages. Those experiences may have been successful or unsuccessful. Whether or not you have had experiences learning other languages, you will have beliefs about language learning. What is it to know a language? What is it to speak a language? How do people learn languages? Is learning a language like learning a poem, like learning chemistry, like learning to play the piano, like all of these, like none of these? How is it normally accomplished (in cases where it really is accomplished, as opposed to only attempted)? Take a few minutes (or hours, as the case may be) to jot down your beliefs about language learning.
DO NOT PROCEED WITHOUT JOTTING DOWN YOUR BELIEFS!
Done? Good. Here are some of my beliefs. I believe that I must work at learning to understand a language just as much as I must work at learning to talk in it. At one time, I believed that if I learned to talk, I would automatically be able to understand. Today, I believe that I must also learn to understand. Another belief I have is that I will only become familiar with a language if I have extensive exposure to it. But I believe that for that exposure to do any good I must be able to understand at least some of what I am hearing. Another thing I believe is that when I am first learning a language, both understanding it and speaking it will be hard work. I expect to speak the language poorly at first, and then, as I keep using the language with people, both in talking and in listening, I believe that my ability will gradually improve. That is, I will go from speaking the language brokenly to speaking it fluently. Another important belief I hold is that I am far more likely to be successful if I can devote myself full time to learning the language, than if I have another full-time job and attempt to do language learning on the side. Learning a language is tiring, so "full-time" might mean five or six hours per day. Or it might mean eight hours. But I believe that I am less likely to be successful if I try to learn a language as a side-line, than if I see language learning as my central responsibility. During my six or eight hours per day of language learning, I believe that I need to devote most of the time to actual communication and conversation. But I also believe that unstructured, real-life conversation is not enough for me. I need to engage in structured communication activities which will help me to learn the language. These structured communication activities are especially important during the early weeks of language learning. Without structured language learning activities, I may not succeed, and even if I do succeed, my progress will be slower, and my ultimate achievement lower, than might have been the case.
How do your beliefs compare to mine? Probably, you thought of things which I did not think of, and I reminded you of things you did not think of. That illustrates an important principle. If you want to have a positive experience learning a language, get together often with friends who are also trying to learn a language, and share ideas with them. They may be learning the same language as you, or they may be learning different languages. If it is the same language, you can share discoveries related to that language. In any case, you can share discoveries related to what helps you as language learners. You can also share your woes. You can laugh together and cry together. Hmm. Guess that's another belief of mine that I forgot to mention in the preceding paragr. I hate lonely language learning. I believe that I need encouragement from people who have some idea of what I am up against.
1.2 Learning about the language versus learning the language
One common belief about language learning is that to learn a language is to learn a body of facts. In Chemistry class you learn facts such as a carbon atom can form four bonds with other atoms. In German class you learned facts such as the first person singular present tense form of möchten is möchte and facts such as the word meaning "dog" is hund. Learning a language is seen as learning hundreds or thousands of facts about grammar and vocabulary.
Another common belief is that to learn a language is to form a set of habits. A common comparison is to riding a bicycle. When you first try to ride a bicycle, or type, or play the piano, you struggle to do it at all. But with practice it becomes an automatic habit.
No doubt there is truth in both of these beliefs. However, there is also little doubt that these are gross over-simplifications. Any kind of learning, whether it is like learning chemistry or like learning to play the piano, is incredibly complex. But learning a language is uniquely complex. Fortunately, you didn't have to understand how your muscles worked, or even what exactly they were doing, in order to learn to ride a bike. It is even more fortunate that your brain will deal with most of the complexity of learning a language without you (or anyone) understanding how it does it. Otherwise it would be a rather hopeless situation.
But you need to set your brain to work. I'm not talking about learning facts about language, much as that may help some people. I'm talking about your brain actually using language as language. In the final analysis, that is the only thing that will get your brain to acquire the language. There are two main ways you use your language ability. You use it to express your own ideas, and you use it to understand other people's ideas. When you are just starting to acquire your new language, that is, when you're are at the absolute point zero, it is impossible to use it to express your own ideas in it. But it is possible even at that point to begin understanding someone else's ideas in it, especially when those ideas are centered around that other person's desire to help you start learning the language. You can start understanding the language before you know how to talk in the language.
Alternatively, some people like to begin by memorizing sentences in the new language. That's O.K. too, but when you memorize a sentence, it doesn't involve you in using language as language. Remember that to use language as language means to put your own ideas into words or to understand other people's ideas from their words. You may learn to say "Where is the bathroom?", and whenever you need to know where the bathroom is, you pull that sentence out of your hat. And you may also be able to use it as a master pattern for asking where other things are. You want to know where the kitchen is, and you know the word for "kitchen", and you think to yourself, "Now let's see, to say 'Where is the bathroom?' I say 'XYZ', where Z means bathroom; and let's see, mm, W means kitchen, so if I want to say 'Where is the kitchen?', I'll just substitute W for Z and say 'XYW'." So then you say "XYW?", and the person you said it to tells you where the kitchen is. Your thought process might not be quite as laborious as that, but do you get the idea? That is one way a lot of people start out learning a language, and many of them end up being successful. However, it takes most people a long time to memorize what amounts to a tiny taste of the language they are learning.
Fortunately, it is also possible to start out from the outset learning the language in ways that are more language-like. In this case, you will get someone to talk to you in the language as your initial means of learning the language. Suppose you want to learn to ask where the bathroom is, and where other rooms are. You might draw a simple floor plan of your house. Your friend, who is your Language Resource Person (LRP), will point to the different rooms in the floor plan, and tell you (in her language), "This is the kitchen; this is the bathroom; this is the entry way". Since she points at each part of the house as she tells you what it is called, you can understand what she is saying, even if you have never heard these words before. You are already processing the language as language in your own brain. That is a central concept in all that follows. You learn the language by processing the language as language.
1.3 You can learn the language in the language before you know the language: an example
Let's use this example of learning the names of rooms in the house to illustrate some key principles involved in learning the language through using the language. You probably wouldn't start out with this in your real language learning situation, but it is something you could do during your first month for sure. The principles illustrated will apply from your very first day of language learning--if you apply them, that is.
So back to the sketch of the floor plan of your house. If your LRP starts off just racing along saying "This is the kitchen; this is the bathroom; this is the entry way; this is the door; this is the sitting room; this is the sink; this is the toilet; this is the bedroom; this is the bed; this is the dresser; this is the dining room; this is the table; this is the ", you will be overwhelmed with the flood of language, and you won't be processing very much of it at all. On the other hand, if she says "This is the kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen, kitchen," that will get pretty boring, and pretty soon you won't be processing the language. You need an approach that will
1. make it possible for you to process what you hear.
2. force you to process what you hear.
3. keep you interested in processing what you hear, and
4. keep you learning more and more of the language as you go along.
Here is a good way to do this. Your LRP begins with just the kitchen and the bathroom. She says "This is the kitchen and this is the bathroom" (pointing to where they are in the floor plan as she speaks). She says that a few times. Then she questions you: "Where is the bathroom? Where is the kitchen?" You respond by pointing appropriately. Do you see why you need to start with two items? If she just told you "This is the kitchen", and then said "Where is the kitchen?", there would be only one possible answer. That is, there would be no choice. If there is no choice, there is no need to process. You could just point at the bathroom without even listening to her. Having two choices to start with will force you to process what you hear. On the other hand, if you start out with more than two items, there will be too much to remember. You may be surprised to find that starting out with "This is the bathroom; this is the kitchen; this is the entry way," is enough to overload your mental processor. You may manage three items O.K., but not many more than that. So by starting out with not more than two or three items to choose between, you make it possible to process what you hear. Now you just have to worry about keeping yourself interested in processing what you hear, as well as keeping yourself learning more and more of the language as you go along.
Now suppose your LRP tells you "This is the bathroom; this is the kitchen," and repeats that several times and then says "Where is the bathroom? Where is the kitchen?" a few times, and you point at the bathroom and the kitchen correctly. Then she says "This is the bathroom; this is the kitchen; this is the entry way" a few times, and asks you "Where is the bathroom? Where is the kitchen? Where is the entry-way?" She then adds a fourth item in a similar manner. I can predict that you'll soon be pointing correctly withobothering to process what she is saying. Can you see why? If she asks you the questions in the same order that she told you the names of the rooms, and keeps asking you over and over in the same order, then all you have to do is remember the order: bathroom, kitchen, entry way ... So if you are going to be forced to process the language as language, it is necessary that your LRP ask you the questions in random order. That way you won't know for sure what she is going to ask. You will have to listen to what she says to you and process it in order to understand. This involves what has been called the principle of uncertainty reduction. You are uncertain what she wants you to point at until you have used what she said as a means of determining what she wants you to point at. This is real communication. Here you have just begun, and you are already using the language for real communication! You are learning the language by processing the language.
So we started with just two items, the kitchen and the bathroom. You want to get to the place where your LRP can ask you to point to different parts of the house and items of furniture, and you can point correctly. Once again, it is essential that you not overwhelm your mental processor. You avoid overloading your mental processor by
1. introducing new items one at a time,
2. having the new item repeated along with several familiar ones many times, and
3. having the new items questioned ("Where is the X?", or "Point to the X", or "Show me the X", etc.) many times, but always randomly, along with questions about other items (otherwise no processing will occur).
Now as you are going along, you may be on your tenth item, which is, let's say, the verandah. Your LRP says, "This is the verandah". In order to keep your mental processor processing, she says this several times but always randomly interspersed among other items you have already learned: "This is the verandah; this is the sitting room; this is the verandah; this is the front yard; this is the backyard; this is the verandah; this is the kitchen; this is the verandah; this is the door." I have yet to see an LRP who appreciates the amount of repetition I need in order to learn new items. At this point I may want to hear verandah twenty or thirty times, interspersed among familiar items as illustrated. The LRP may think that five repetitions is plenty. Fortunately, most LRP s will soon come to accept the need for repetition, as long as you keep gently reminding them.
Now imagine that you are working on your fifteenth item, say the kitchen sink, and your LRP is asking you "Where is the kitchen sink?" randomly interspersed among questions such as "Where is the bathroom?", "Where is the kitchen", etc. Frequently, you will discover that you can no longer remember an item which you knew a few minutes earlier. Suppose while the LRP is working with you on "Where is the bathroom?", she asks you "Where is the sitting room?" A few minutes earlier, it appeared that you had learned sitting room. Now you find that when she says the word for sitting room, you cannot remember what it means. What your LRP does at such points is to act as though you now need to learn sitting room, and she asks you the question "Where is the sitting room?" many times, always interspersed randomly among other questions. Once you are again able to consistently recognize sitting room, she will emphasize kitchen sink a few more times, since that is the new item you were working on. If you aren't having any problem with kitchen sink, the LRP goes on to item sixteen, perhaps, stove.
At times you may have special difficulty with two items which strike you as similar in pronunciation. This happened for me in Urdu with kira which means 'cucumber', and kela, which means 'banana', since we were learning the word for cucumber and the word for banana in the same session (using real cucumbers and bananas, along with other pieces of fruit and vegetables). These two words may not look all that similar to you, but I have seen learners become confused over choices involving words that were considerably less similar than these. When this happens, you should have the LRP focus on the two items which you are confusing. At first she can just concentrate on those two items: "Pick up a banana; pick up a cucumber; pick up a cucumber; pick up a banana; pick up a cucumber; pick up a banana; pick up a banana; pick up a banana; pick up a cucumber...". She should then add one or two items that you already know well, along with cucumber and banana. Then add one or two more familiar items. Gradually, she'll get back to using all of the items you have learned so far during the current activity.
Now suppose you had never heard this language before the session with the floor plan. You've been processing the language as language, and doing so for, say, one hour. Your session ends. You have to go to the airport to pick up a friend who is just arriving from your home country. Your friend tells you, "I need to visit the restroom". You say to the security guard, in your new language, "Where is the bathroom?" You've never said that before. In your session you only learned to comprehend it and didn't try to say it. But you now needed it, and it came out, and it felt like natural communication. That is, you had an idea that you needed to express, and you expressed it. Your visiting friend is impressed. The security guard points to the bathroom and says something which you don't understand. You don't realize that you used a word that only means "bathroom" in a home, and a different word is used for the airport restroom. But it just doesn't matter at all at this point. The security guard knew what you meant and knew that you were doing your best. After all, you've only been learning the language for an hour. I'd say you're doing pretty well.
Now alternatively, you might have learned to say "Where is the bathroom?" without processing the language as language in the way I described. For example, you might have taken a 3x5 card and written on one side of it "Where is the bathroom?" in English, and written on the other side of it "Where is the bathroom?" in the new language. Then you could have tested yourself on that over and over, and repeated the sentence to yourself hundreds of times until you had it memorized. You still could have said it to the security guard.
The way you learned it was quite different. You learned it by being asked where the bathroom was (on your little floor plan). When you were asked, you had to determine what you were being asked. That is, you actually had to understand the new language. Then you indicated where the bathroom was, conveying to a speaker of the language the fact that you had understood what she asked.
In the early days of language learning, many people, perhaps most people, are able to learn much more quickly if they learn the language by processing the language than they can learn by memorizing expressions from on 3x5 cards, or from tape recordings. More importantly, they will be giving their brain the chance to start developing genuine comprehension ability. You start out small, and by using appropriate techniques, you steadily and rapidly expand your comprehension ability. You'll be amazed at how much you will be able to comprehend by the end of a month. It will be considerably more than you could have memorized in the same month. If you choose rather to learn primarily by memorizing sentences, it will do very little for your comprehension ability. You only learn to comprehend by comprehending, and you learn to talk by using the language to formulate and utter sentences which put your own ideas into words as the need arises. You can create situations in your language sessions in which needs arise. You can also plan your language sessions so that they relate to the communication needs that you are facing in real life settings.
As I say, the approach I am suggesting is not the only approach. You may well succeed by memorizing a lot of sentences and using them as patterns for constructing new sentences. As you do this, it will cause people to talk to you in the new language, and someyou will understand some of what they say and thus have the chance to process language as language and thereby start developing your comprehension ability. But I believe you'll be off to a much slower start than if you use your times with your LRP to do heavy-duty, large scale language processing.
Chapter 2. Getting started with your Language Resource Person
Now you have some idea of what I mean when I speak of learning the language by using the language as language. Let's get to it. You need a language resource person. That is the same as saying that you can only learn to communicate if you have someone to communicate with. Often, the best way to find the person or people you need is to go through people whom you already know. If you don't know anyone, you may need to just start asking around. It is better if you do not make a long term arrangement with anyone to help you in this way at the outset. If you make a long term arrangement, and then the person turns out to be unsatisfactory, you have a problem. If several people help you once or twice, not expecting to do more, and out of them one or two become regular helpers, no one's feelings are likely to be hurt, especially if you continue your friendship with all of the people who initially helped you.
It may be good to make it clear that you do not want someone to "teach you the language". Otherwise, they may send you to an esteemed expert on the "high" language. You may have difficulty learning mundane everyday language from such a person. In addition, such a person may have very strong ideas about how languages are learned, and those may not be the most helpful ideas. You might tell people that first you need to learn the common language, and then when you can speak the common language you will go to that person to learn about the high language.
As people help you during your early struggles with their language, you need to be sure that it isn't a one-sided arrangement, where you get a lot out of it, and those who help you get little out of it. Realize that if people exert themselves for you, you owe them something. Fortunately, many fruitful language learning activities can go on in the context of friendship and social visiting. To the extent that you need a regular, scheduled format with an LRP, you need to take care that your helper is adequately rewarded.
When you are seeking people to help you, you are likely to find that some people automatically light up at the idea. If this doesn't happen, you may need to do some careful relationship building first. Start with people you know, and become friends with their close friends and relatives, and then in turn with those people's close friends and relatives. Spend time with people. As people are people together they tend to do things for each other, and soon there is a sense of mutual obligation. Get it? Mutual! At that point you should be able to get someone to at least give an hour to serving as an LRP. You might do that with a few people. Hopefully, someone will enjoy it enough to want to do it often. If you end up arranging a regular schedule, you should consider paying a fixed amount. If you don't pay a fixed amount, then try to make sure that the benefits to the LRP cost you at least as much as you would pay if you did pay a fixed amount. In many parts of the world, the going hourly wage may be low by your standards, but it is best to stay close to it. In other parts of the world you may pay five or ten dollars an hour. In that case, you'll surely want to have a powerful strategy for using the time to the full, and come to your language learning sessions well prepared, and tape-record all that you do in the sessions, and make extensive use of those tape-recordings following the sessions.
For further thoughts on the language learner's approach to relationship building, see Thomson (1993c) .
2.1. Your very first language session
O.K., you now have your language resource person (LRP) with you sitting at the table in your kitchen. What do you do now? Well, you could draw that floor plan of your house. But we had better reflect for a moment. As a matter of fact, you never start a language session without considerable prior reflection and planning. It should occur to you that the first thing you need to do is to put your LRP through the ropes. As I talk about your first session, in which you are putting your LRP through the ropes, I'll probably keep getting side-tracked by the ropes, if you don't mind.
2.1.1. TPR -Total (and minimal) Physical Response
The method I described in connection with the floor plan of your house falls into a broad category of activities which are called Total Physical Response (Asher 1982; Silvers 1985 ). In the case of the floor plan, the physical response was merely to point at the bathroom when the LRP said "Where is the bathroom?" There was nothing very " total" about that response. But people still call it TPR. The original idea was that the more you put your whole body into responding, the better you learned. That may make sense. Learning a language means learning to relate patterns of words to aspects of experience. So if the LRP said "jump", and you jumped six inches, the "experience" side of the equation might be less than if you jumped two feet.
Personally, I wouldn't make a big deal of that in general. (As a matter of fact, I would change the meaning of the abbreviation TPR to stand for, "Tune in, Process, Respond". That is, as the LRP tells you something, you tune in to what she said, figure out what it means, and demonstrate to her that you understood her by responding appropriately.) However, for training your LRP on the first day, it may be good to do total TPR. In order to help your LRP get the hang of things, you can begin with simple commands that involve a gross physical response (in the best sense of the word gross). These include things like stand up, sit down, walk, run, stop, go back, turn around, clap, talk, be quiet, go to sleep, wake up, eat, drink. In some cases you will mime the activity (as with sleep). In other cases you will perform it literally (as with sit down).
Here's some homework: Come up with an additional fifty simple instructions you might use for TPR at this point. You need to start learning to prepare for language sessions. So start.
I SAW THAT. DO YOUR HOMEWORK!
2.1.2. Back to your first language session
Now, back to your session. You will have your LRP give you these instructions in the manner described earlier, namely, starting with two instructions, adding one new one at a time, with considerable repetition, always ordering the instructions randomly so that you will be forced to process what you are hearing and decide what to do in response. You might aim to learn ten or twenty instructions your first day. The vocabulary is likely to be basic, essential vocabulary, so the time is well spent from the standpoint of vocabulary learning. But you will also have helped your LRP to get an idea of how you will be learning during the early weeks. You are trying to get a foothold on the language by getting enough basic vocabulary and sentence patterns to function with as a basic speaker. And you are trying to jump start your learning by becoming thoroughly familiar with a lot of basic vocabulary and sentence patterns.
This system may be a bit complicated for the LRP initially. One good way to train the LRP is to have a second language learner participate with you. I hate doing language learning by myself, anyway. Besides that, you can have a lot more flexibility in communication if there is at least one other person. I enjoy working with my wife. In that case, we have used the following technique with a new LRP. The LRP and I sit facing each other, and my wife stands or sits behind me so that she is visible to the LRP, but not to me. She does the actions, and that is what prompts the LRP to instruct me to do them. A new LRP is unlikely to give twenty repetitions of the instruction "stand up". But my wife knows that I need that much repetition, and so she prompts the LRP accordingly. She takes care of complicated details like starting out with only two instructions,adding new ones gradually, keeping them in random order, and so on. Whatever she does, the LRP instructs me to do. Eventually the LRP gets the idea. Whenever you use a new variety of TPR you can train your LRP in this manner.
You or the LRP should also keep a written record (either in words or simple drawings) of what you have covered. Otherwise she may forget to keep going back to earlier items while introducing later ones.
At first, the LRP may find the whole business of TPR bizarre. If she is someone who has "tutored" other language learners, she will soon be surprised at your rate of progress compared to others she has helped, and that is likely to encourage her to press on playing games with you. In addition, she is likely to find such language learning sessions fun and interesting, as opposed to dull and boring.
You yourself may have trouble with such activities, feeling that you are being silly or foolish. It may be that some people will simply be unable to get past this, and will prefer to learn a language by memorizing sentences and so on. But why don't you give it a try. You may not believe that you can be developing real communication skills through what seems like game-playing. But one expert on how children learn their first language, Jerome Bruner, has observed that game-playing can play a central role in that process (Bruner 1983). Games are fun. Playing games involves less stress than behaving proficiently for real-life purposes. And you really can develop a lot of comprehension ability through game-like activities. In a month or so you can learn to recognize many hundreds of common vocabulary and understand many types of sentences. You can start developing genuine speaking ability, as well. You will then be in a strong position to rapidly become proficient in using the language in a wide variety of real life situations.
2.1.3. TPR with lots of junk (Object Manipulation)
You need to do more than simple TPR. Despite the fun-and-games nature of TPR in its classical form, it will probably get boring for your LRP if that is all you do. Besides that, there may be limits to how much you can learn this way. Strong proponents argue that every grammatical construction can somehow be embedded in TPR instructions. This is more likely if you broaden your range of activities to include some in which the physical response is less than total. As I say, people still refer to such activities as TPR.
One easy twist to add is to use lots of physical objects in connection with TPR activities. You can find a large number of common objects around the house, or in the market. And many objects will suggest actions. What actions can be performed with a piece of cloth? A piece of paper? A piece of rope? Get it? Manipulating objects in compliance with the LRP's instructions falls within the broad category of TPR activities. I will also refer to this simply as object manipulation.
2.1.4. TPR as role-play
Another twist is to base a TPR activity on some real life communication situation. For example, you can lay out a number of sheets of paper or envelopes in a format such as the following:
[picture of paper arranged as city blocks]
Pretend the papers are city blocks, and the spaces between them are streets. You hold a small toy car in your hand, and pretend that it is a taxi, and you are the driver. Your LRP gives you instructions such as "Drive three blocks and turn right", and you comply by moving the toy car appropriately. This is a simple variety of role-play. By combining TPR with role-play, you can learn to understand expressions that you will need to use in real life communication situations. When you get into those situations you will be surprised how many of the expressions will come to you naturally, and you will use them in speech, even though you did not memorize them by rote. You learned them by hearing them repeatedly and each time processing what you heard and responding to it.
2.1.5. Pictures - the language learner's gold mine
Another twist can further extend the potential of TPR. Use pictures, either photos, or line drawings (or even video recordings) as the basis for communication. In the long run, pictures have far more potential than simple actions. Pictures make it possible to learn to talk about the whole range of daily activities and experiences. You can repeatedly use the same pictures to learn to understand sentences of a variety of patterns. Suppose that during your eighth language session you are focusing on learning to understood sentences which describe an ongoing process in past time. Each sentence begins, "When this picture was taken..." and goes on to say what was happening when the picture was taken. "When this picture was taken, this man was ploughing. When this picture was taken, this woman was making bread. When this picture was taken, this man was fixing a chair." Etc. The LRP makes up these sentences on the fly. You have to process what you hear, and respond by indicating which picture she is describing. There are a hundred pictures (though only a few are in view at any given moment). The verbs themselves (ploughing, making, fixing, etc.) are not new to you, since you have been through these same pictures with the LRP many times. What is new is the form of the verbs used to describe an ongoing process in past time. By the time you get through the hundred pictures, you will have processed and responded to a hundred sentences which describe a past ongoing process. You'll be surprised how familiar you will have become with that sentence pattern.
While listening to a hundred sentences in a given form (and responding by pointing to the picture being described), you may get lazy, and not attend to the form of the sentence, but only catch one or two key words which are enough to allow you to respond. It may therefore be good to go through the pictures again, allowing the LRP to use two contrasting patterns. For example, she might use a pattern that begins "After this picture was taken-- " along with the pattern beginning "When this picture was taken--". Using two or three contrasting patterns will increase the chances that you thoroughly attend to and process what you hear.
There are many sources for pictures. You can clip them from local magazines, travel brochures or old National Geographic articles related to your host country or to neighboring countries. It is far better if you can take your own photos of local scenes. It may be that your LRP can help with this. On one occasion in Pakistan, my wife and I were able to take over a hundred photos (three rolls of film), capturing a wide variety of common daily activities, in the space of about two hours. It actually took longer to arrange the pictures into a good sequence and pasting them in the book took several hours!
For the early stages of language learning I recommend pictures with certain characteristics. Each picture has one or more people in it who are the central characters. In addition there are one or more inanimate objects which the person is using or doing something to. For example, the person may be using a hammer to build a table. Thus, in addition to the person, there is both a hammer and a table. Another person might be riding a bicycle. Another might be standing at a cash till. Two people might be simply sitting on a bench. The objects the people are involved with need not always be inanimate. Someone might be feeding an animal or nursing a baby. And it is not necessary that every single picture meet these criteria, but it is good if many of them do. I would consider having two or three identical sets of the pictures developed. Then I could glue one set in a notebook and have one or two sets loose. For different activities you might find it preferable to either use the pictures in a notebook or loose. Or you might want your co-learner and yourself to have the same pictures. For example, your co-learner might show a picture to the LRP from her set. The LRP then tells you something about the picture, and you respond by pointing to the same picture in your own set. Loose pictures can be manipulated and sorted. There are also advantages to the consistencof order and arrangement which a picture book provides.
A variety of commercial resources are also available. Harris Winitz has prepared a number of books of drawings for language learners aimed at highlighting specific vocabulary and sentence patterns. This series, Language Through Pictures, is available from the International Linguistics Corporation, 401 89th Street, Kansas City, MO, 64114. Both Longman and Oxford University Press publish books of pictures for language learners, grouped according to topics or settings, which they misleadingly call dictionaries. These are The Longman Photo Dictionary and The New Oxford Picture Dictionary. They are available in a number of major languages, but can easily be adapted to other languages, although they are based around Euro-American themes and settings for the most part. A variety of visual aids for language learners are available from Sky Oaks Productions, Box 1102, Los Gatos, California 95031.
Finally, at any point you can resort to drawing sketches, stick figures, or diagrams to use in a given language learning activity. I suspect that having the actual objects in hand is better than using sketches of them, but sketches are a whole lot better than merely using your mind's eye, since sketches still allow you to respond to what you process by pointing or by manipulating them. Without such aids it is hard to be sure you process what you hear. More importantly, these external aids are often what enables you to understand the language in the first place, so that you have a chance to process what you hear. If you can't process what you hear, it is of little use to you.
I will have many suggestions below regarding using pictures to highlight specific sentence patterns. A wide variety of sentence patterns can be highlighted by having the LRP take a pattern and use that pattern to make a comment about each picture in succession. In that way you will quickly hear and comprehend a hundred examples (if you have a hundred pictures) of a single sentence pattern. In addition to the examples I will give below in connection with specific sentence patterns, I have given a concise overview of this approach in Thomson (1989) . I suggest a slightly different approach in Thomson (1992). Both approaches assume the pictures you use are pasted in a book, and that you make repeated passes through the book with the LRP telling you things about the pictures on each pass. The two approaches differ mainly in the third pass through the book. On the first pass through the book the LRP teaches the words for human beings (man, woman, boy, girl, etc.). On the second pass the LRP teaches the words for the inanimate objects which the people are using or acting upon. On the third pass, in the first approach, the LRP uses a single verb repeatedly in describing every picture. The verb might be holding. The descriptions would then go, "This man is holding a hammer. This woman is holding a spatula. This child is holding a toy. (Etc.)" for perhaps a hundred pictures. (It may be necessary to use two or three verbs in some cases.) The point is to have the experience of comprehending a lot of sentences which contain subjects and objects (such as child and toy, respectively). The approach suggested in Thomson (1992) is a little less artificial. After talking about the humans on the first pass through the book and talking about the most salient objects on the second pass, the LRP simply makes what she feels is the most natural descriptive statement of what each person is doing on the third pass. Often, the learner will not understand what the LRP says on this pass, but the learner and LRP tape-record it all, and go over the tape together, discussing whatever the learner did not understand. I fluctuate as to which of these two approaches I prefer.
2.1.6. Back to your first session again
Now, back to your first session with your LRP. In order to keep your session interesting, you might include three different types of activities. You can begin with classic TPR using simple actions ("stand up," "jump," etc.). Then for your second activity, why don't you learn the names of a whole bunch of common objects that are present in the setting where you'll be having your language sessions. You can respond to questions like "Where is the churn?" by pointing to the churn, or whatever. Why not go for another ten or twenty vocabulary in this manner during the session. Then you can do something with pictures.
During this first session, the LRP can get the basic idea of describing pictures for you. If I were the language learner, I would start with the set of pictures that are glued in a notebook, rather than with a loose set. I will have arranged them in the notebook in such a way that the first few pictures have a man as the central character, and the next few have a woman, and then in subsequent pictures men and women are randomly interspersed. Then children are added, and then perhaps youths, and old people.
Now, my LRP would begin telling me which type of person is in each picture. "This is a man. This is a man. This is a man. This is a woman. This is a woman. This is a man and a woman. This is a woman. This is a man. This is a boy. This is a boy and a woman and a man. This is another boy. This is a boy, too. This is a girl. This is a girl and a boy. This is a girl and a woman and a man. These are some boys. These are some girls. This is an old man. These are some children and some women. This is an old woman..."
These first picture descriptions may sound pretty simple minded, but I encourage you to start out this way. Language learners find it gives them a real sense of hearing and understanding the language right off the bat. You realize that you are genuinely learning the language from day one. It also gives the LRP a clear sense of communicating with you in the language, which helps to overcome preconceptions she may have about how languages should be taught.
2.1.7. For those who want to start talking in the first session
Your major focus during the early days of language learning should be on learning to understand the language. Of course, learning to say things like hello and good-bye at the very outset is unavoidable. But some language learners tell me that as soon as they start learning to understand the language by means of TPR, picture descriptions, etc, they simply must start attempting to say all those things that they are learning to understand. For some learners, this may well be true. In other cases, language learners simply cannot imagine learning to comprehend without attempting to speak, because they have never given it a try. In any case, the issue is controversial, with worthy supporters on both sides. I am a strong believer in what is called delayed oral production. I believe that most people will learn far more quickly if they concentrate heavily on learning to comprehend during the early days of language learning. But you may not agree. If you prefer to start speaking during your first session, you should still follow the sequence of first learning to understand words and sentences, and then basing your speaking attempts on what you have learned to understand. For example, once you understand the expressions which the LRP has used in describing the pictures, you can say those things yourself, perhaps in reference to new pictures where those expressions make sense. In some of my suggestions I recommend you respond to the LRP by pointing at pictures or objects. You may prefer to respond orally, using words and phrases such as here, there, this one, that one, rather than merely by pointing. In connection with TPR activities, once you understand the TPR instructions, you can start learning to say what it was that you did when you responded to an instruction. For example, if the instruction is "Take off your glasses", you can take off your glasses, and then say "I took off my glasses." Or the LRP can perform the actions that you have learned the words for, and you can tell her what she did. But I don't really recommend this during the early period of language learning, and I'll have more to say about the issue shortly.
2.2. Aftyour language session is over
Now you have finished your first session. You spent an hour or more preparing for it. The session itself lasted for one or two hours. And you tape-recorded the whole thing. Take a breather. Your work isn't done.
2.2.1 Using tape-recordings of your sessions
You can extend the value of your session considerably by wise use of the tape-recording you made during the session. You did make a tape, didn't you? I find I get very clear tape recordings if I use lapel microphones. I like to use a stereo recorder with two lapel microphones in case I want to record two native speakers interacting, or to record myself and a native speaker interacting. I also like to use a double cassette recorder so that I can copy sample bits of the session onto a second tape. This second tape will grow from day to day, as I add key excerpts of each day's session. I don't need to save all fifty instances when the LRP said "stand up" during the session. But during the final part of the initial TPR activity I had learned to respond to fifteen commands, and the LRP was rapidly using all of them (in random order), and I was rapidly responding to all fifteen (or however many) commands. Therefore, by dubbing the final few minutes of TPR instructions onto a new tape, I can save a complete record of the expressions I learned in the initial TPR activity of that session. I will similarly dub excerpts of the second (pointing) activity onto the same tape.
With the picture descriptions I may just dub the whole works over onto the abbreviated tape. I can listen to that several times: This is a man, this is a woman, etc. Keeping up with the descriptions and not losing my place is enough of a challenge at this point to force me to keep processing what I am hearing.
As I listen to the recording of the TPR activities, I can actually respond, or I may just recall how I responded during the session. I may even listen to the tape of each entire session a few times during the days following the session. I would hope to be adding a new session every day, but it is important to keep cycling through the taped excerpts of previous sessions.
In the coming weeks, you will be systematically focusing on a large variety of sentence patterns. You will always learn to understand the sentences during your session. However, you could easily forget much of what you learn, were it not for the fact that you keep cycling through the taped excerpts of your earlier sessions. As you listen to excerpts of an earlier session, you can recall what you were doing in the session as you processed and responded to what you heard. If you have difficulty maintaining concentration while listening to the tape, then you can actually perform the responses (for example, point to the appropriate picture upon hearing a sentence about it), as you listen to the tape.
2.2.2 Daily record keeping --more than just a frill
It is important that you devote some time at the end of each day to record keeping. If the alphabet of the language you are learning is similar to the English alphabet (or some other alphabet you are already comfortable with), and if the spelling is closely tied to the pronunciation, then you can begin using the writing system at once. It may be that there is as yet no writing system for the language, or that the writing system is very different from any you have known before and quite difficult. In that case, you will be better off to postpone learning the writing system for awhile. For the sake of your record keeping, just write things down roughly using English letters and whatever symbols (say, accent marks) you find helpful. I am personally capable of writing things in a technical phonetic alphabet, but during the first days of language learning I don't worry about writing down the fine details. That is because I do not use what I write as a basis for my pronunciation anyway. My pronunciation (when I get around to speaking) will be based on what I have heard, not on what I wrote. The writing is for the purpose of keeping track of what I learned, and providing some visual reinforcement, which I find helpful.
One important component of your daily records should be a simple log of the vocabulary you have covered, with a rough English translation for each vocabulary item. This will help you in keeping track of your progress in acquiring vocabulary, and will also assist you as you plan your subsequent sessions, since each session will include some review of previously learned items.
One of your goals can be to learn to recognize thirty new vocabulary items every day. That will be 150 per week. Thus after seven weeks you will be able to recognize over a thousand common vocabulary items. If you're more energetic, you can realistically go for fifty new vocabulary items per day, and thus learn a thousand items in a month. The key is to be well prepared, and to keep listening to your tapes and reviewing previously learned items in subsequent sessions.
You should also write out any observations you may have as to how the language is put together, or why you think certain forms of words may be used in some cases, and different forms in other cases. You can relate this to your goals for covering a broad range of sentence patterns, a matter which I will discuss at length below. You should also mention anything that puzzles you about how the language works.
You will also keep various checklists of ideas for your language sessions. Below I will suggest checklists that you can add to from day to day. You will use them as part of the basis for planning your language sessions. These include a checklist of situations in which you need to use the language, and topics which you need to discuss in the language. You can also have a checklist for special areas of vocabulary that may come to mind. You can go out and look around the community for ideas for vocabulary and examples of daily life situations, and add these to the checklists. I will provide you with many suggestions for vocabulary and sentence patterns to cover. These, too, should be used as checklists.
Another important component of your record keeping is a diary in which you describe your whole experience as a language learner each day. This will have various uses. For one thing, reading back over your diary as the weeks and months go by will help you to appreciate the progress you have made. For another thing, the diary will help you to share your experience with a language learning consultant who may help you, or with other language learners, who may also share their diaries with you. The discipline of diary writing will help you to maintain a high level of self-awareness, which is important in the ongoing process of planning and self-evaluation.
2.2.3 Planning each session.
In preparing for every session, you can plan thirty new vocabulary items, and plan to review at least that many that you have previously learned. In your plan, you will want to include at least three different kinds of language learning activities, as we did in your first session. For example, you might do one activity using vegetables. In a second activity, the LRP may have you get up and go to different parts of the house and do things that are characteristically done there. Third, you may do something with pictures. The exact nature of your three (or more) activities will change from day to day. Keep the sessions fun and interesting for both you and your LRP.
In addition to learning new vocabulary, you will also design your sessions to highlight specific sentence patterns. I'll give examples below. Can you see why you need to spend at least an hour per day getting ready for your time with your LRP?
In summary, each session should include
1. Activities that increase your vocabulary.
2. Activities that increase your ability to understand different types of sentences.
3. Review of material covered in earlier sessions, integrated into what you are now learning for the first time.
2.2.4 Your daily routine
During this early phase of language learning your daily activities might include:
1. Spend one to two hours planning and preparing for your session with your LRP.
2. Spend one to two hours with your LRP. Your LRP will follow your instructions and use the new language to communicate with you in ways that require you to hear, process and respond. You will tape record the session.
3. Go over the tapes, and copy summary excerpts to another tape.
4. Listen to the abbreviated tape meaningfully (that is, in conjunction with the same pictures, objects, or actions that you used in your session), a number of times.
5. Do your daily journal writing and record keeping.
Initially, you will be majoring on learning to understand the language. Thus your plan for your session will aim to increase your ability to recognize vocabulary, and to understand different sentence patterns. Later I will give you a lot of specific suggestions regarding vocabulary and sentence patterns to cover in your lessons.
This daily pattern will change with time. Eventually you will be spending more than two hours per day with LRP s, and less time going over the tapes of the sessions. The reason for this is that initially, working with a live speaker is very demanding, and both you and the live speaker tire easily. You can relax with the tape recorder, and process the language input from your session over and over. Once you get rolling in the language, you will feel a need for much more extended live conversational interaction with your LRP.
2.3. Some more advanced techniques for increasing your ability to understand the language
The kinds of activities I have been discussing so far may prove fruitful for a month or more. However, they will not quite make you a basic speaker of the language, even in terms of your comprehension ability. What I am about to suggest are techniques for moving to a new level. These activities can be thought of as helping to form a bridge between the time when you are a bare beginner and the time when you are a non-beginner. For that reason, I discuss them further in Thomson (1993b).
From your very first day, you are understanding statements and instructions in the new language. What is it that makes it possible for you to understand a language that you are just beginning to learn? It is the fact that the things that you and the LRP are seeing and doing give you the meaning of the words and sentences that you are hearing. The LRP says, "This is a man," and you can see what she means.
Once you understand a few hundred vocabulary items and a lot of basic sentence patterns, you will be able to understand much that is said even when you don't "see the meaning" in front of you. But your ability to understand will still be limited, and you still need to use methods which make what you are hearing easy for you to process. Think of how TPR and pictures help you during the early weeks. They help you by drastically narrowing the possibilities you need to consider while processing a sentence. For example, suppose that during one of your first sessions your LRP says "Pick up the banana." You have in front of you a banana, a mango, a pineapple, and a guava. You hear "Pick up the banana" in the language, you process it, and you respond by picking up the banana. There were only a few possible things the LRP might have said at that point. The fact that the possibilities are limited is essential to your early ability to understand what is said. Now suppose three weeks later you are in a language session with four pictures in front of you, and your LRP says, "Before this picture was taken, this man hitched up his oxen." This sentence can only apply to one of the four pictures in front of you, since there is only one picture in which a man is using a pair of oxen. You think about what you heard, process it, and understand it. Once again, you are aided in your understanding by the fact that the possibilities of what might be said are limited to things which could be said about those four pictures. Granted you are now coping with a wider range of possibilities than when you were picking up pieces of fruit, but the possibilities are still restricted by the contents of the pictures, and this is a major aid to you as you seek to process what was said to you.
After a few weeks, you have become adept at understanding isolated sentences that are tied to things you see and do in the session. Now you want to work on understanding longer stretches of speech containing many sentences, and you want to be able to understand them without the aid of things you see and do in the session. This is a natural next step in your development of comprehension ability. The key to being able to understand long stretches of connected speech at this point is the same key that enabled you to understand all those isolated sentences: use techniques that restrict the number of possibilities which you need to consider. Have your LRP tell you things that have a reasonable degree of predictability. Some ways you can do this are to have the LRP tell you stories that you already know (from having heard them in English or another language), have the LRP give an account to a third party of something you and she did together, or have the LRP tell you all the steps in a familiar process.
If your LRP can read, you might have her read over a reasonably short English story, say in a children's book. Or you might read it to her. You should also make yourself familiar with the story, if you aren't already familiar with it. Then your LRP can retell the story to you in her language. On one occasion I had an LRP who was well versed in the Bible, as was I. During my third month of language learning he told me the entire Old Testament story of Joseph, in detail. I was able to follow a large portion of what he said, since I already knew the story. This provided me with practice in comprehending a stretch of speech which went on for a considerable period of time. Another possibility might be to watch a video drama together, and then have the LRP tell you the entire story in her language, perhaps on a subsequent day, to make it less boring.
You can engage in extra-curricular activities with your LRP, so that you will come to have a number of shared experiences. The LRP can recount to you any experience that you have shared. It is even better, certainly more natural, if she recounts it within your hearing to another person, preferably someone with a level of language ability comparable to your own. By all means, tape record it.
Recounting all of the steps in a process is called the Series Method. Here again, the speech is made easier to understand by the fact that each step in the process is relatively predictable, which drastically limits the range of possibilities you have to consider as you process what you hear. Consider all the steps in preparing a potato to be fried. You pick up a potato. You turn on a tap. You pick up a brush. You hold the potato under the running water. You rub the brush back and forth against the potato. The dirt that was on the potato is washed away. The water becomes dirty. The dirty water runs down the drain. You turn off the tap. You open a drawer. You take out a potato peeler. Etc. (You can finish the series as an exercise.) Ordinary life provides hundreds of ideas for series. If the series are based on every-day mundane processes, you can bet that the vocabulary you hear and lea
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