Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language

Becoming Fluent

Becoming Fluent

How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language

Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02923-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-33047-3 (retail e-book)

2014048125

d_r1

We dedicate this book to our parents:

Michaela Whitaker and Richard Roberts

and Paul and Ila Kreuz

Contents

Prologue

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

1    Terms and Conditions

2    Set Yourself Up for Success

3    Aspects of Language

4    Pragmatics and Culture

5    Language and Perception

6    Cognition from Top to Bottom

7    Making Memories …

8    … And Making Memories Work for You

Epilogue

Notes

Suggestions for Further Reading

References

Index

Prologue

Adulthood is the perfect time to expand one’s horizons through the study of other languages. All too often, however, the pleasure that should be inherent in learning to speak another language is marred by negative thoughts and experiences—past and present, real and perceived. As a result, we wrote this book for adults of all ages who want to study a foreign language but don’t know where to begin.

Growing older confers on adults knowledge and abilities that more than offset any age-related decline. Through this book, we strive to show adult foreign language learners how to take advantage of their considerable strengths. To do so, we have drawn upon relevant research from cognitive science, as well as our own experiences teaching, conducting research, learning languages, and working and traveling abroad. Nothing would give us greater pleasure than to know that this book has encouraged adults to think about the advantages that only experience can bestow, and then to apply those advantages to language learning.

Acknowledgments

There are many people to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for their assistance with this book. All readers, however, should be grateful to Andrew Garen, whose expert advice made the book more readable (and shorter). Gina Caucci’s thoughtful editing saved us from many embarrassing errors, big and small. Alyssa Blair, David Kovaz, and Monica Riordan kindly gave us helpful suggestions. We also thank Cierra Wilson, who crafted the cognitive science starfish that appears as figure 1.1. Thomas Santos advised us on pedagogy from the perspective of English as a Second Language. We also thank Welcome Kim for allowing us to share his language-learning experiences. Richard Blackwood gets all the credit for the Sherpa analogy, which he graciously allowed us to steal. Jeonghoon Lee deserves thanks for refusing to teach Richard how to swear in Korean and for making sure Roger saw more of Korea than just downtown Seoul. Rick Marcus’s teaching acumen and steadfastness as a friend more than make up for his ability to beat Roger at Scrabble. At the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), without the heartfelt enthusiasm of Priscilla Lujan, Doug Gilzow, Lauren Russell, and Mary Kim, this book might never have left the ground. We would also like to thank Leslie Bassett and Alexi Kral, whose feedback after reading the manuscript was a source of optimism and motivation in the final stages of compiling the book. We also thank Michele Trahan, of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, whose hospitality and encouragement we greatly value.

In Seoul, Keunhyun Shin and Inseop Lee were charitable with their praise, smiling through clenched teeth as Richard butchered Korean. Thanks also go to Richard’s teachers at FSI’s field school, Soon Kwak, Young Hee Lee, Yoon Jean Lee, and Sung Hea Park, who are caring and dedicated educators personally invested in the success of all their students. Tahk Sooyean deserves special mention for the gallons of coffee she drank Saturday afternoons, helping Richard prepare for his Korean language exam. In Okinawa, Momoe Miyagi took it upon herself to mentor Richard during his Japanese immersion trip. And many years ago Erica Urena’s love of Portuguese ignited Richard’s passion for it too. In Tokyo, Yoshihiro Kitagawa never tired of Richard’s endless questions about Japanese language and culture. Fumiko Ito was more than Richard’s sensei; she brought him into her family. Portugal could have no finer representatives than Kimon Oppermann and Alexandre Marques da Cruz, whose love of the Portuguese language, inquiring spirit, and goodness to all make them beloved teachers and friends. In Brazil, Angelica Monnerat personified dedication in teaching. In the Korean language department at FSI, Eunice Kim, Jessica Welter, Chung Ha, Yeonmi Bae, Sun Il Kim, Chris Song, and Kookhee Park made learning Korean fun and interesting at bathhouses, restaurants, parties, coffee shops, and even in the classroom. In the Japanese department, Yoshie Zorn, Kenichi Haramoto, Meiko Inouye, Masako Nanto, Miyuke Tsuchiya, and Setsuko Okabe deserve credit for bringing Richard’s Japanese up to a level fit for proper society. Tyrone Parker showed inexhaustible patience over long evenings spent helping Richard with his French. Greg Morgan’s love of language curiosities and wordplay never fails to entertain, and was responsible for our learning about the Unspeakableness project. And because Jeff Newbern is both a skilled teacher and such a generous friend, several examples from his classes now grace this book.

Roger would like to thank his teachers of German: Eric Paderi, Sherry Gruber Wagner, and Marianne Bigney. Jason Braasch and Jenny Roche made helpful suggestions that are greatly appreciated. For their support and encouragement through all phases of the writing of this book, he is especially grateful to his department chair, Frank Andrasik, and Laura Simpson, his administrative assistant. And for his role in turning a terrified twenty-one-year old into an experimental psycholinguist, Roger acknowledges his huge debt to Sam Glucksberg.

Finally, at the MIT Press, we are indebted to Senior Editor Philip Laughlin and Acquisitions Assistant Christopher Eyer for believing in this project and bringing it to fruition. Without Judy Feldmann’s deft editing, the book would be much less comprehensible. We also thank three anonymous reviewers whose comments on the proposal greatly sharpened our thinking on this topic. Because Richard works for the US Department of State, he would like to make clear that the contents of this book are his opinions and not those of the US government. Any errors of fact, omission, or commission are entirely Roger’s … just kidding—they are Richard’s, too.

Richard and Roger

Memphis, Tennessee

August 2014

About the Authors

Richard Roberts’s educational background spans the speech and hearing sciences, clinical psychology, and experimental psychology. After earning his doctorate at the University of Memphis, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Health Statistics. He spent twelve years teaching psychology in Europe and Asia with the University of Maryland University College. During that time, he achieved varying degrees of proficiency in German, Portuguese, and Japanese. Since 2006, he has been a US diplomat, serving at embassies in Niger, Japan, and South Korea. He has also studied French, Japanese, and Korean at the US Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute. He currently works in the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy in Seoul.

Roger Kreuz has been a professor of psychology for over twenty-five years. After studying psychology and linguistics at the University of Toledo, he earned his doctorate at Princeton University, and was a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive gerontology at Duke University. He has published on topics in the psychology of language, primarily in text and discourse processing and figurative language. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. He has coedited two books: Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics and Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication. He has been a student of German and Old English, but his progress in the latter has been hampered by a lack of native speakers to practice with. He currently serves as an associate dean at the University of Memphis.

1

Terms and Conditions

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.

—Michelangelo

When you meet someone who speaks a foreign language well, you may attribute her skill in the language to natural ability.¹ This is probably because you don’t know about all the hard work that went into achieving this level of mastery. But with the exception of certain people we might call savants, anyone who has ever learned another language as an adult did so only as the result of real effort. In that way, this book is most assuredly not a quick fix. But if you apply the specific skills and abilities you have honed over a lifetime, learning a language can be fun and rewarding. The older you are, the more tools in your toolbox you can take advantage of to reach your goal. Everyone possesses unique sets of skills and abilities that can be applied to language learning—if they can get past some false beliefs. It is to these that we now turn.

Three Myths about Foreign Language Learning

From the very beginning of Richard’s Korean language study, he felt frustrated with his progress. It seemed as if no matter how hard he tried, he was not advancing fast enough. His teachers were constantly encouraging him to study harder and to memorize more. He knew that he was working hard—studying for class, meeting with native Korean speakers for language exchange, watching videos, and learning Korean songs. At first, he thought he had hit the age wall. Richard had been successful when he had studied German, Portuguese, French, and Japanese, but he began the study of Korean at age fifty-two, and he thought that perhaps he was now too old to take on another language. Certainly, according to conventional wisdom, he should not expect much progress.

One day, he was having coffee with his Korean language exchange partner (who has the inviting name Welcome). Richard wondered out loud whether Welcome felt his English had improved since coming to the United States. It certainly seemed to Richard that Welcome’s English had gotten better, and Richard was expecting Welcome to tell him that he thought so too. Instead, Welcome said he didn’t know. When Richard asked him what his teachers thought, Welcome replied that because American teachers always compliment students, he couldn’t trust what they told him. Welcome went so far as to wish that his teachers would be more critical. For Welcome, the more they criticized, the more they showed that they were interested in his progress.

This was an eye-opening conversation for Richard. From then on, he realized that his perceived lack of progress in Korean was a function of his own expectations about what it means to be a successful language learner. Richard had been measuring his progress by how much he didn’t know. He saw the glass as half empty, and therefore pushed himself to memorize more and more material. But relying on rote memory alone is the second-worst thing any adult foreign language learner can do.

Of course, memorization is required to learn a foreign language; however, rote memorization exercises (such as listening to a text and then parroting it back verbatim, memorizing long passages of dialogue, slogging through flashcards) place the adult learner at a disadvantage cognitively. Because this ability declines with age, placing too much emphasis on rote memory can lead to frustration, is demoralizing, and can ultimately cause any adult language learner to quit.

You may be wondering, if rote memorization is the second-worst thing for an adult learner, what is the worst? It is the belief that one is too old to learn a foreign language. The next thing we want to do, therefore, is to dispel this, and two other myths that surround language learning in adulthood.

Myth 1: Adults cannot acquire a foreign language as easily as children.

On the contrary, there is evidence to suggest that adults can learn new languages even more easily than children. There are only two areas where children may be superior to adults when it comes to language learning. The first appears to be their ability to acquire a native accent. It is certainly the case that normal adults are capable of achieving native-like fluency as well. But even if an adult language learner is more likely to speak with an accent, there is no reason to be overly pessimistic about it, as long as it does not interfere with intelligibility. Children’s other advantage over adults is that they have no language learning anxiety. In other words, because children aren’t burdened by a belief that they cannot learn a language, they are free from such self-defeating thoughts.²

Myth 2: Adults should learn foreign languages the way children learn languages.

Children’s brains and adult brains are different. Therefore, why would anyone expect that the same teaching techniques that work for children be appropriate for adults? They aren’t. But, unfortunately, adult language learners sometimes try to learn a language by stripping away all of the strategies and learning experiences that helped them become successful adults in the first place. They try to learn a foreign language purely, the way they acquired their first language. This isn’t possible. Trying to do so inevitably leads to frustration and a higher probability of abandoning the goal. A more fruitful approach would be for adults to build on their considerable cognitive strengths and to not envy or try to mimic children’s language learning.

Myth 3: When learning a foreign language, try not to use your first language.

Some adult language learners believe that they should never, ever, translate from their first language to their target foreign language. But this advice deprives adult language learners of one of their most important accomplishments—fluency in their native language. Although it is true that one language is not merely a direct translation of another, many aspects of one language are directly transferable to a second language. It’s not even possible to completely ignore these aspects, and trying to do so can be frustrating.

For example, an English-speaking adult who is learning Portuguese could hardly avoid noticing that the Portuguese word to describe something that causes harm in a gradual way, insidioso, is suspiciously like the English word insidious. It would make no sense to pretend as if prior language skill in English is not transferable in this case. It is true that such cognates are not found between all languages and are sometimes inaccurate (as in wrongly equating the English word rider to the French word rider, which means to wrinkle). Nonetheless, looking for places where concepts, categories, or patterns are transferable is of great benefit, and also points out another area where adult foreign language learners have an advantage over children.

Regrettably, any of these myths could prevent even the most highly motivated adult from embarking on a language learning journey. However, there is a great deal of research that addresses such false beliefs. Insights from the field known as cognitive science offer guidance that is directly relevant to the adult foreign language learner.

What Is Cognitive Science?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary movement that began in the 1960s and became highly visible as a scientific enterprise during the 1970s. Cognitive science occupies the intersection of a number of fields in which researchers from many disciplines explore questions about the nature of mind. The disciplines centrally involved in this endeavor include psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology.³ The field of education is now commonly included as well (see figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

We chose the seven-armed starfish (Luidia ciliaris) to illustrate the field of cognitive science. Like the arms of a starfish, no one branch of cognitive science is more important than another. The arms must work in concert for the starfish to move. There is no head or tail, but all of the arms radiate from a central executive.

As a scientific movement, cognitive science is notable because it represents a deliberate shift away from extreme specialization. Cognitive scientists actively promote inclusivity and the adoption of new points of view, and this cross-fertilization has produced hundreds of important new research programs. It is still the case, however, that cognitive scientists are generally trained in one of the specific disciplines shown in figure 1.1. For example, Richard and Roger were trained as psycholinguists in experimental psychology programs; however, they are also cognitive scientists because their graduate training emphasized cognitive science and their research and ideas are influenced by these related disciplines.

Before discussing how cognitive science relates to adult foreign language learning in more depth, we first need to define some terms.

Mind the Gap

In describing mental processes, cognitive scientists frequently categorize them as being either top down or bottom up. Top-down processes, which are also referred to as conceptually driven processes, utilize what you already know in service of perception and comprehension. For example, experts solve problems differently from novices because they have more knowledge and experience in a given domain.

Although top-down processing applies to cognition in general, it plays an important role in the comprehension of spoken language. The environments in which we speak to one another are rarely very quiet ones—think about the last time you met some friends for a meal in a restaurant. Even in a relatively quiet establishment, your conversational partners will be competing against background noise and the voices of other patrons. And if it were necessary for your ears to pick up every sound spoken by your dinner companions, you simply wouldn’t be able to understand much of what they said—there is too much noise to contend with. Fortunately, the cognitive system is able to fill in the missing information, even without you being aware that this is happening. This is why background noise is more disruptive for beginning language students than it is for advanced students—without greater knowledge of the language, top-down processing can’t fill in what’s missing.

Although top-down processing is clearly very important, it’s not the whole story. Bottom-up processing, which is also referred to as data-driven processing, is the opposite of top-down processing. This term refers to situations in which you perceive a stimulus without preconceptions or assumptions about what you’re experiencing. Instead of being guided by expertise or familiarity, bottom-up perception depends solely on information that comes from your five senses. For example, vision and hearing are mostly bottom up until the brain can make sense of what was seen or heard. If you wear glasses, then you are correcting for a deficit in the data your eye must use in order for your brain to see. Glasses correct a