Grab a spoon!

I have a very active three and a half year old son who has taught me a great deal about language acquisition. From birth, he has primarily been exposed to English and as I have the energy and time for, I have exposed him to French. He has a good handle of English for his age and is at least able to do some French, which as a parent who is a non-native speaker I'm content with what he can do.

As a linguist, I have been fascinated and humbled by the way his language developed. My husband and I have never avoided using big words or altering our language when we are talking to him. As he went from forming sentences into joining them into paragraphs to tell stories, I have had to remind myself sometimes that he does not always know exactly what he is saying. He is repeating expressions that he has heard us use and trying them out to see if he can make them work. I think this is why adults find little kid stories so cute - the child is experimenting with the language that he knows, sometimes in ways that the adult had never imagined it being used.

How has this informed my teaching and my ideas of language acquisition? For one, it has really made me reflect on what I can expect from my students at various points along the ACTFL proficiency scale. When I first started learning French in college, my professors expected us to always respond to questions with a complete sentence. I was taught in my methodology classes that having students respond this way would teach them to form complete sentences. Even when I was teaching exploratory French at the middle school level, I tried to encourage my students to answer in complete sentences. When they didn't, I would say the correct sentence and have them repeat it. I always struggled with this, though, because real language is not always a complete sentence and just because they repeated the sentence back to me, I can't say that it ever stuck with them to reproduce at a later time.

Enter the real world learning scenario of my son, and I realized that 1) he was not able to even say a string of words no less a sentence at the beginning and 2) I did not naturally turn his one word answer into a full sentence. For example, I would show him a ball and ask what it was. When he responded with "ball," I cheered for joy and repeated the word not worried about whether he used a direct or indirect article. 

I started to ask myself why it should therefore matter when I am trying to get my students to identify a pen as a "stylo". The levels of the ACTFL proficiency scale suddenly came to life for me. Novice level students need to learn words first. Then, they will start stringing them together into phrases. Then, the phrases will become sentences. All along the way, there will be errors and mistakes, but that is part of the natural learning process. I have started to wonder if traditional language learning methods have been largely unsuccessful because it goes against how our brains naturally learn language.

Like other teachers that have made or started making this transition, I realized that I needed to have ways to explain this "new" approach to learning language. I frequently tell my Novice level students that they need to go back to their days of Kindergarten and First Grade. I'm not looking for the same high level work in their answers and eventual sentences that their other teachers demand. The challenge in my class, particularly in the beginning, is that they are having to use words in a language that they are learning. If they were doing the assignment in their native language, it would be super easy.

So, how do I explain to my students the difference between level 2 and level 3? This is the other major way that my son has helped me, this time with explaining language acquisition in simple terms. I do really well in making analogies with common experiences to explain more complex ideas. That is how my husband has learned so much about my job. I find a way to relate it to sports, which is something he is very familiar with!

For those who are familiar with ACTFL, you probably have heard that Novice students are like parrots. I say they are like babies who are eating solid food for the first time. I have a spoon with simple, easy to digest language that I am feeding to them. As they become better at digesting and using the language, I let them help me with the spoon. We both have a hold on it so that it stays level and the food doesn't end up all over the floor.

When my students become Intermediate level learners, I am now handing them the spoon, and they are to feed themselves. Therefore, I expect their work to be messy and to have errors. The first several times a parent hands over the spoon to the baby to feed himself involves a lot of baby wipes and a thorough cleaning of the kitchen! I want my Level 3 students to start experimenting on their own, to be creative, and to try new things but most of all I want them to be messy so that I can better understand where they need help.

In my mind, Level 3 is when my students are finally able to start asserting themselves in the language and to become independent learners. Yes, it will be messy and full of errors and that is ok. It is part of the learning process. While my three year old can be quite the conversationalist, he still makes mistakes and that is ok. It is only through usage and experimentation that he and my students will get better at communicating. On the first day, I tell my Level 3 students to grab their spoon, to experiment, to be creative, to be messy, and to make mistakes because that is how they will learn and grow.