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Language Mastery: What the Research Tells Us

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

More into our series of 50 Lessons Learned About Languages. Today, I really want to talk about the research. I am so grateful to so many people out there sharing research on second language acquisition, on languages and children, languages and health. The contributions are so valuable, and there’s some great takeaways. And there are so many relevant and practical and interesting articles and research projects out there, but I really want to focus on one particular set of research because I really have felt that this research encapsulates the things that we really need to know on how people can learn more than one language. And that’s the research of Dr. Stephen Krashen.

I also love Dr. Krashen’s research because I think when you understand something really well, you can explain it in a simple, concise, and easy to understand way, and that’s exactly what he’s done. And I want to talk about his five theories of language acquisition.

The very first theory that he talks about is learning acquisition. And I think this is really important because he makes a really important distinction. Learning are those really deliberate activities that we do to learn another language, or even our own language for that matter. Think verbs, parts of speech, vocabulary, grammar exercises, et cetera. Specific focused learning. And there’s acquisition. It’s those things that you… It’s like soaking everything up.

Think about maybe watching a television show and the language is really understandable. Maybe there’s captions, or subtitles, or people are using lots of gestures to understand. Or reading something really interesting where you’re going to soak up all that grammar and all that vocabulary in a really interesting, real context that’s going to really stick with you. And I love those because the power is in learning. And the real application of it, in my opinion, is understanding those two things and then putting them together. It’s absolutely the perfect marriage.

Learning is, as Krashen defines it, more learning about the language. Understanding patterns and verbs, et cetera, parts of speech, different verb tenses, and acquisition is really soaking up real language.

Learning words and phrases in meaningful chunks is how you’re going to learn your grammar. You’re not going to learn about it. You’re going to actually learn it, or acquire it really, to use it.

And that brings me to my next lesson is that these two things are the perfect marriage. They’re the absolute perfect marriage. So I would always recommend focusing on understanding, which we’ll get into with another one of the theories, but really spending twice as much time listening, you have two ears. And reading, you’ve got two eyes. Than speaking or writing, than producing language. Really focus on that acquisition.

But when you mix in focused learning of a language, particularly as an adult, that’s the key to fast progress. Don’t lead with grammar, but don’t be afraid of following up,