Narrowing the Gap Between Learning and Acquisition

Tony Cañadas Ruiz

Tony Cañadas Ruiz is a teacher at "Trinidad Martínez" primary school in Almería, Spain. He is interested in humanistic teaching, especially working with NLP, Multiple Intelligences and using Suggestopedia techniques in the classroom. Storytelling is one of the activities he uses most in the classroom and also exercises with music using the imagination. He has written "Combining Approaches: Towards my Own Way of Teaching" ( HLT) and is the author of the book Portraits of the soul, published by "Colecciones Spacios". He works with students of all ages. E-mail address: airtonys@hotmail.com

I started learning English when I was a very young teenager. I was very disappointed with the education I had had both at school and college. They had taught me English (yes!) for more than seven years but I could hardly say anything without making a mistake, and my pronunciation was appalling. I was fed up and had no interest at all in the English language.

Then, one day when the classes were over and I was going home I saw an advert on the notice board. It was about private English teaching. My mother had suggested that I should try a private teacher and maybe it could make a difference. So I went, and this is the way I met my first efficient English teacher, Stephan Thiel, a British expatriate living then in southern Spain.

The system he used was called" The Direct Method". He didn't speak a single word in Spanish to me from the day we started. He used a little book with lots of pictures and everything was clearly exemplified, so I didn't have any comprehension problems. The grammar was more or less taught in an inductive way (usually drills and lots of oral practice). I have to say that in three months I had learned more than in the previous seven years. I was very proud of myself. I was perfectly able to express my feelings openly in English.

Stephan convinced me that the" Direct Method" was the unique and only way of learning a language properly. He blamed the whole Grammar-Translation method that had been used with me as the one responsible for my former lack of accuracy and oral skills. He encouraged me so much that after being with him for one year and having acquired an advanced degree in speaking, I decided to become a teacher myself, and I enrolled at University and studied Teacher Training.

The problem started when I finished. I was so keen on Direct Method that I thought it was the only possible way to teach a language properly, so as soon as I started working I wanted to put it into practice.

The first school where I worked was "Saladares," a private Catholic one. There were about 25 students in the class and I was really eager to practice my "Direct Method" techniques with them. Suddenly, I realized that the things were not working properly. I spoke to my pupils all the time in English and used gestures to make them understand it better, but I had the impression that their English was not improving. It was five or six months later when, after being exhausted of trying all my Direct Method skills with them that I started to realize there might be something wrong with it.

When I spoke with some of my colleagues they mentioned to me the importance of the "Notional-Functional" approach and how there wasn't any single method that had been infallible for English teaching. So I started using this Communicative Approach, basically concentrating classroom work more on oral skills rather than in written exercises, but having in mind that sometimes the use of the student's own mother tongue was also an important fact, sometimes for the student's understanding, especially of grammatical structures.

As time went by, and at summer time I had the opportunity of teaching one to one. I still had an obsession about the efficiency of "Direct Method" and I wanted to try this for private teaching. I have to say the result was not bad. The thing that was completely useless with large classes could work out with a one to one, but there was one thing that I considered essential: The student's motivation. I was certainly very enthusiastic when I started learning with Stephan and this thing made me learn faster.

Stephan was on the opinion that the student has to learn the second language in the same way he/she acquired his/her mother tongue. Although this theory may look very attractive I think we must consider first two elements that have to be identified if we want to have a clear idea of how a student builds up his/her own knowledge of a foreign language: learning and acquisition.

One of the many mistakes in English language teaching has been to ignore the unavoidable relationship between language teaching and the study of how a language is acquired. Some theorists highlight the differences between language learning and language acquisition. For Noam Chomsky, there is a set of universal grammar rules that are already established when the child is born. What he/she does is building them up and transforming them as he/she grows up. For Chomsky, the period of language acquisition ends when the person has already acquired his first language. The languages the person will learn in the future will be inserted into the human brain by a process of learning and not acquisition.

For some experts, when the child is born, the language is learnt as a way of controlling his own environment. The language will therefore be a very useful tool for the child to get what he/she wants or express his/her feelings about the situation surrounding him/her. Once this goal has been achieved, the child will have his/her needs fulfilled. If the pupil wants lo learn a different language, he will no longer need it as a way of surviving, for theses tools have been already acquired, therefore he will assimilate this new language by learning and not by acquisition. Many of the parents who want their offspring to learn a new language think that the aim of it all is to master it as a native speaker, but they do not realize some points.

First of all, when we talk about bilingual education we are dealing with a person who a) learns a language in the country where this language is spoken, or b) one or both of his parents are native and the learner picks up the language in a familiar background. Second, if we bear in mind the limited time for language learning in the educational system, the large quantity of students and the number of other subjects makes it almost impossible to pretend that the student could be bilingual unless there was a change in the whole educational system.

Having now clearly distinguished the differences between the learning process and acquisition, one could clearly think that although these situations have to be understood separately we realize that the faster way of learning a language is certainly by acquiring it. So despite being impossible of putting both concepts on the same level (I believe in calling a spade a spade), we can do something to narrow the gap between learning and acquisition which is not the same as making them equal. I think there are two essential factors we have to bear in mind if we want to achieve a successful outcome: Motivation and Aptitude.

Several experts have found out there are two kinds of motivation: Integrational motivation and Instrumental motivation. We talk about integrational motivation when the student studies a language to be part of the community where this language is spoken. Thus the individual is not just interested in acquiring another language, but another culture as well. Instrumental motivation, on the other hand, is when people want to learn a new language to get a new job or go to an important college. We usually find this kind of motivation in Primary and Secondary Education.

It is widely accepted that integrational motivation is stronger than the instrumental one. So it is the teacher's task to make students feel motivated in that way. These are some techniques for this purpose:

- decorate the classroom with posters, photographs, leaflets that show scenes of the L2 country.

- crganize sports contests where they can practice sports played in the foreign country.

- take students to see performances in the foreign language (cinema, concerts,).

- encourage the students to collect items from the foreign country (stamps, post-cards).

Nevertheless, all these theories try to analyze the process of language learning and acquisition as a whole without realizing that students don't learn languages in the same way because they have different abilities and it is the teacher's task to discover them to make language learning successful.

I believe that Neuro- Linguistic Programming (N.L.P), that has helped teachers to think more about VAKOG, the different learning styles (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, Gustatory), and Multiple Intelligences, in which Howard Gardner recognizes at least eight different intelligences (logical-mathematical, linguistic, musical, spatial, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist), have both helped to improve language teaching methodology in the recent past. Therefore, aptitude has to be closely linked with the kind of intelligence that the student is better at working with.

Some specialists say the best age to learn a second language is between four and eight, because the child learns through simple exposition. However, there are teachers who think that children shouldn't learn another language until they don't master their own one well enough. Some theorists even say that an early initiation to a second language could lead to a handicap in the student's intellectual development. If teachers and educators had taken these ideas seriously, learning a second language in our beloved Europe would have just been impossible!

One of the most successful theories is that little children have a better assimilation for phonetic elements that teenagers or adults. Though it can be true in some way, nobody would explain according to that statement how I acquired a good pronunciation level when I was a teenager.I think language learning has to do also with imitation, and imitation and motivation have to be very closely together. I have met people who have learnt English in their late twenties who have acquired an immaculate pronunciation, while others younger have had serious problems of making themselves understood.

As a conclusion, I believe that if we create a positive humanistic environment in our classroom and make the language interesting for the students (also regarding their own potential), this gap between learning and acquisition can be easily narrowed.

References

Arroll, J and Roberts.Modern Language Aptitude Test, MLAT Manual. The Psychological Corporation, New York, 1959.
Cuerpo de maestros. Temario de inglés. Sabine Buda. ED.MAD. Sevilla.
Gardener, R.C and Lamberta. Attitudes and motivation in Second Language learning. Rowley. Massachusetts, 1972.
Jackobits, L.A. Foreign Language Learning. Rowley. Massachusetts, 1971. Krashen, S.D.The Natural Approach. Language Acquisition in the classroom. Pergamon Press. Oxford, 1984.
Maslow, A. H.Motivation and Personality. Harper&Row. New York, 1070.

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