Dr. Bill VanPatten: How To Learn Languages (According To Science)

I'm an ESL teacher. The claim that students should not worry about mistakes and bad pronunciation is wrong. Although such defects disappear over time, they will persist in a foreign language. Even worse: Mistakes and mispronunciations become ingrained over time, and it becomes almost impossible to correct them because mistakes are too ingrained, too ossified. So students should be concerned about all this from the get-go; otherwise, they will accrue a lot of mistakes, become very sloppy, and it will all ossify. It's gonna be too hard to get rid of it later on. I guess that's why some people claim it's impossible to have native level pronunciation, usage, etc. However, it's an erroneous view. The ossified mistakes--that's what prevents people from getting perfect pronunciation and usage. Wrong patterns are transferred from the first language to the second, and the student is often unaware of this process. Ergo, he or she is doomed to always speak with an accent, usage mistakes, and pronunciation mistakes, even after living among native speakers for 20 years. However, if a student pays attention to wrong pronunciation and mistakes and works towards getting rid of them, he or she may even attain a native level competence at least with pronunciation and common vocabulary. The same applies to lower level students. It starts there! Don't learn everything the wrong way and don't let it get ossified in your brain. I understand this linguist doesn't really care about his French but some students do.

Regarding reading: one of the more interesting benefits of having an expansive vocabulary in your native language when learning a foreign one (if they are closely related) is that there are such an extraordinary amount of cognates and semi-cognates, though they don't always have the exact same meanings. You can absorb so much additional vocabulary. So, for example, if you know the very uncommon and antiquated english word "exigency", which means "demand", then the spanish word "exigente" and "exigir" become almost instantly recognizable. Another example is the spanish word "sanguinario" which resembles "sanguinary" in english.

From all that I am learning about how language classes are conducted, I have to say I was so very lucky to have the high school Spanish teachers I had. Sure, we had textbooks to get us started on vocabulary, but the entire class was held in Spanish. Those of us who participated, acquired the language vs. learned the language. They made the language so fun and interesting that students mostly wanted to participate. We talked, read, saw short movies, or whatever she could fit into the class period. We had pen pals from Spanish speaking countries, so that we could practice our Spanish, and they could practice their English. That experience inspired me to continue on with language acquisition my whole life. Thank you to the wonderful teachers I had back in the 80s, before too many non-teachers got involved in how and what children learn in school! (and I know that's a subject for another day.)

I find output (speaking and writing) helpful for learning not because the process itself teaches me but because it easily points out my weaknesses and what I don't know. Which in turn allows me to focus on those weaknesses when I go back to input

So great to see you back in the SLA realm, Profesor VanPatten! You're the best! Love the analogies that you gave during this talk.

If only the comprehensible input advocates would make the simple distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge a lots of confusion could've been avoided. Explicit knowledge (acquired by means of explicit instruction) is how most learners start to learn any new skill, and once they get better this knowledge becomes internalized and the skill becomes automatic so you don't have to think anymore about how to go about doing what you learned, you just know it intuitively. So when the comprehensible input advocates argue that one doesn't rely on explicit knowledge of rules as a way of showing the inefficiency (or redundancy) or explicit study of grammar they are simply mixing up different things, which renders the whole argument fallacious. Of course in the beginning stages of learning explicit knowledge of rules is not yet enough to make a person fluent, but this is simply because the rules have not been yet internalized and the person has not yet perfected his skill. This applies to learning any activity imaginable - at the beginning learners are very slow, inefficient, make mistakes and so on. But does this show that explicit instructions are useless? (in the form of teachers or textbooks) Not in the least. Now it is possible to learn many skills by just observing how it is done and doing it oneself via trial and error. For example you can imagine someone trying to learn the rules of chess by observing chess games. But is this the most efficient method? And will it make you a better chess player compared to someone who's learned the rules from a textbook? It doesn't follow at all. Similarly with language learning, there's no yet any empirical support for the idea that it's more effective or efficient to learn grammar purely trough input. This is still a pure conjecture as far as I'm aware, and is most probably completely wrong given the proven effectiveness of traditional learning methods, both in language learning and other fields.

Very interesting. I agree that the key is to learn enough words to bootstrap the language. Once you can listen to real speech, learning accelerates dramatically as I found with French. It’s no longer work, it’s fun. I am learning German, and after almost 18 months I am not even lower intermediate. The problem I have is learning vocabulary as it is so different from English. Learning words on flashcards does not work, they don’t stick. Listening to as many simple dialogues as possible works, but it’s slow. Regarding accent, maybe someone cannot get a native level accent, but there are techniques to improve one’s accent and anyone can learn these techniques. Adults make assumptions when they speak, and often do not notice realise it. For example English speakers of French almost always adopt English timing. Syllabic timing, which is used in French, can be taught, assuming the student wants to learn.

Amazing interview! I agree with everything the (former) Professor said. It would be fantastic another clip together with both Dr. Bill and Prof. Krashen

A language can only be aquired by using the language (passively and eventually actively). Grammar, word lists, translations, images, etc. are just TOOLS to make the language more accessible and comprehensible.

Thanks for making videos like that and showing scientific evidence of learning language👍 please make more of kinds of this things

Great interview: a very knowledgeable interviewee and a 'smooth' interviewer that actually listens, asks interesting questions and lets interviewees speak. You might be surprised by the amount of potentially interesting interviews out there that get ruined by an unskilled chairperson. I was engaged all the way through "despite" all the ads, i use quotation marks bc for an interesting video like this one, I (1) don't care and (2) understand this is a way for the content producer to produce (also) some (well-deserved) revenue.

A likely reason for some people sounding native and some people not has to do with personal views and importances on specific identities. There has been research that says that Arabic dialects more or less don't have to be mutually intelligible due to the number of differences between them, but they are, the research argued, because they consider themselves a part of a larger community. Having good feelings about things drives a lot in human life even including the immune system and recovery, so obviously in something so deeply central to our personalities, feeling and importance should be playing a huge role behind the scenes. Our unconscious mind does so much work behind the scenes choosing what to remember and what to forget and what importance to put on things we learn and experience.

This is great. Thank you. Using Dreaming Spanish right now.

Minute 59: Fiction has been found to increase empathy levels in two peer-reviewed studies I’ve read. Nonfiction had no effect on empathy levels. Given that mirror neurons, which make empathy possible, support intellect and adaptation, I would argue that fiction enhances intellectual pursuits as much as the knowledge we glean from nonfiction.

This was great! Thank you.

Great job segmenting the video, very helpful!

I personally have a cousin that learned Hindi from her dad, English from her mom and Spanish from her nanny all before she was 8 years old, then moved to another country and picked up that language. I guarantee she didn't spend hours in front of a board learning grammar. She simply absorbed them all as that is how the brain functions.

Very informative interview , thank you!

I think Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis has a lot of merits. However, I believe there are some things that are missing from that hypothesis. Some things do not add up. For instance, Krashen says you need to have 95% or more content to be comprehensible. But observing infants or young children who emigrate and are thrown into a school where a new language is spoken, it seems to me that these people are not exposed to highly comprehensible input. In addition, Krashen doesn't make a distinction between written and spoken content. I do not think a person who is exposed to largely written content can become fluent in that language.

loved this interview