Active Meaningful Communication

Why does this work?  

The basic four step process for teaching language works because it starts the clock.  The four step process will not get your students to instantly remember vocabulary or how to ask a question.  Everything they were able to say with confidence on Monday will be forgotten on Tuesday.  You have to keep in mind that learning language is a physical process in the brain.  It is chemistry and it takes time. Just like it is impossible to travel from Los Angeles to New York in an instant no matter how much we are able to imagine it, learning a language needs time.  

You might begin to think that if learning a language is just about time, then why can’t the student just watch a bunch of movies in the target language?  The answer to that is watching movies wastes time and does not affect the clock. 

You’re confused. That’s fine. I will explain.  

Let’s suppose your student is a Japanese child.  You want to teach this child how to speak English.  That child will need about eight hundred hours of speaking practice. Yes. Eight zero zero. That is a lot of time. If you have one lesson for one hour a week, it will take sixteen years.  I’m guessing you want to go faster than that.  So you go back to watching movies and listening to English songs. That’s not going to advance those 800 hours. That is instead wasting time. 

Why?  Don’t worry. I will tell you why. 

In order to move that clock your student needs to engage in Active, Meaningful, Communication. Those three words are the key.  Let’s take a look at each one. 

Active.  You’ve heard of so called “active listening” before. That doesn’t have a place in the second language classroom.  Listening does not wind up that clock. Speaking makes the clock tick. Your student needs eight hundred hours of speaking practice to learn English. If you want to teach Russian it is even more time, clocking in at about one thousand three hundred hours.   If you want to teach Spanish, you are in luck. Spanish only takes about six hundred and fifty hours. 

Different languages have different linguistic features, like number of vowel sounds, grammar constructions, intonation, etc. We call this markedness. The more markedness a language has, the more hours it takes to learn the language. 

And we need to remember that learning language is a physical process in the brain. The brain kind of puts a cap on the number of hours it can benefit from language practice between sleep cycles. At most you can get about two hours of benefit each day.  So cramming 20 hours in one day will not work. Two is the limit and then rest until the next day. 

But back to Active Meaningful Communication. 

Active: This means the student is doing something. They are using the muscles in their mouth. They are using their hands. They are using body language. They are looking at someone and reading their expression. Listening to music or watching a movie is a purely passive kind of thing. Even if the student sings along with a song, that is still passive and the words of the song might just be sounds to them. 

Meaningful: This means that the words the student is speaking has some kind of meaning attached to them. You might think, how can the student understand the meaning of a word in a language they don’t know?  Easy, you provide context for the word. A picture. A gesture. You mime out the action of a verb. Even yes and no has some real world anchor that allows the student to understand the meaning. 

DO NOT USE TRANSLATION.  NEVER NEVER NEVER use translation ever.  If you are teaching Latin then the student must understand Latin directly in Latin. Latin is not English written in code. English is not Japanese written in code. I will have more negative things to say about translation later. For now, just know that the real world context you provide for a student to understand meaning should absolutely NEVER be translation. 

Anyway. 

Communication: For this I want to tell a story. This is a fictional story that in no way should be considered connected to any real world person. (Cough, wink)

There were these two Catholic priests.  They were sent to Africa in the 1950s to preach the gospel. In order to convert the locals and earn trust they priests were told to learn the local language. They were also told to say their prayers in the local language. In case you didn’t know a priest is supposed to pray the book of psalms seven times a day.  They have a schedule for it and it keeps them very busy. 

One priest was Marcel. He prayed the psalms in the local language of the African tribe and in seemingly no time he was speaking the local language.  

The other priest was named Karl. He also prayed the psalms in the local language but he did not learn the language. In fact he never learned the language and he had to rely on Marcel to translate for him. 

They both did the same thing. Why were the results different?  

After the Second Vatican Council the pope of that era opened up a process so that priests who wanted to leave the priesthood could go.  Karl wanted to go.  He didn’t want to be a priest anymore. Marcel wanted to stay. Does this have anything to do with learning language?  It does actually. 

When Marcel was praying the book of psalms he believed he was having a conversation. He believed God could hear him and he believed he could feel God responding to him.  They were not just empty words.  He was communicating with God. 

Karl did not believe anything was happening when he prayed the psalms. For him, he was just forcing himself to go through the motions of saying the sounds and trying to get it over with. 

The same action had a different result because for one it was communication and for the other it was not. 

Now let’s consider two students who each keep a diary. One student knows that no other person will ever read their diary. Their writing skill will not increase. The other student knows that someone will read what they wrote and then later come and talk to them about it. Their writing skill will improve. 

Why is it like this?  That is just how the brain works. If we cooperate with how the brain works we can get it to do things for us.  If we fight against it we waste time. 

So always keep in mind that we are aiming for Active, Meaningful Communication. Anything else is wasting time.