After several weeks of looking at CLT Principle 3 (Language Acquisition is Constrained by Internal and External Factors) in Bill VanPatten’s book While We’re on the Topic (ACTFL: 2017), we are moving on the CLT Principle 4.
It seems to me that this is a principle with which everyone agrees. That does not make it settled and not controversial, however. The differences of opinion arise over what constitutes “input”, what interaction should look like, what an “appropriate level” is, and the nature of the materials that should provide that input.
If we accept the position elucidated by VanPatten in Chapters 1 and 2 that the language itself is the only data that the brain is able to use in constructing a mental representation of the language, i.e. acquiring the language, then VanPatten’s fourth principle is already constrained in terms of materials.
However, just to be clear, VanPatten defines the term input in the context of language acquisition. (It has other meanings in other contexts.)
Input means one and only one thing in language acquisition: language embedded in a communicative event that the learner attends to for its meaning.
This means that anything in a language other than the target language is not input and not useful or usable by the brain for acquisition. It also means that target language that is not understandable is not input. And, it means that understandable target language that is not being used for communication is not input.
Three scenarios illustrate VanPatten’s position. I will paraphrase.
The teacher asks a student, D’ou êtes vous? The student responds, De la Californie. This is an exchange in which the student has attended to the language for meaning, so the French is input. The teacher might follow up with Ah. Mais vous vous trouvez loin de chez vous. The students answer, Oui, mais je vais retourner. The entire encounter was communicative; both teacher and student attended to meaning.
In a different class, the teacher asks the student to repeat the sentence, Je me trouve loin de chez moi. The student dutifully does so. This time, the French is not input because the student was not attending to meaning but simply repeating sounds. Thus, acquisition is not facilitated.
For the third scenario, VanPatten imagines a class in which the teacher simply tells students that trouver normally means “to find”, but se trouver means “to find yourself in the sense of being located somewhere or being in some situation.” Since the explanation was in English, no target language input was provided, so acquisition was not facilitated in any way.
I am adding a fourth scenario that VanPatten does not include:
The teacher begins the very first class with Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. Je m’appelle Madame Bovary et je suis la professeur de français. Je suis de la Côte d’Ivoire. Vous allez apprendre la langue de la poésie, de la philosophie et de l’amour dans cette classe. Students look at the teacher but do not respond because they have understood nothing of what she said.
Was input provided in this last scenario? It depends. If students were attempting to understand, then input was provided; it simply was incomprehensible and therefore not useful or usable. If students have, for whatever reason, either ceased or not begun to attend to meaning, then no input was provided.
Some might argue that as long as the language is being spoken, some good is being done: students’ ears are being attuned to the sounds of the language, students are getting a feel for the rhythm and melody of the language, just being exposed to the language is somehow beneficial. The question remains: Beneficial for what? Certainly not for acquisition. I’ll have more to say about this later.
The second and third scenarios are very common in public school settings – at least in the United States.
To an extent, they represent different views of what constitutes input. That is why a definition is so important. If you do not accept VanPatten’s position on the first two principles, you will have a different definition of input. However, we are not arguing that point right now. For discussions of the utility of grammar and rote repetition, see VanPatten’s book or my posts on his earlier chapters.
Allow me to finish this post with a personal anecdote.
On Wednesday of the past week, my department had a retirement lunch for me and another faculty member who is retiring. To my surprise and delight, a former student came. This particular student’s love of languages awoke in my German class during the 1998-1999 school year.
Since graduation, he went on to study linguistics and eventually became a creator of “artificial languages”. That is, when a film or TV series needs an alien language, he is one of the people who can create one. (Not every writer is like JRR Tolkien; many of them put in words or short phrases but have no full language, so when their work is translated to the screen, a coherent structure must be provided, and there are people who do that for a living. My former student is one of them.)
While David, my former student, has several languages that he has created, his most famous one is Dothraki for Game of Thrones. When I asked him about the actors and “learning” the language, he said that they take a couple of different approaches. Some of the actors simply want to say their lines. David sends them a recording of their lines, and they imitate the sounds and inflection. End of story. They aren’t even interested in knowing the meaning of the words they are saying except as it impacts the delivery of the lines. This is similar to the situation in which teachers ask students to repeat sentences. Usually it is for the sake of “improving or perfecting the student’s accent”.
Other actors want to know what they are saying and will ask for a translation of the lines. Then they can speak the lines in a way that reflects meaning. This is still not really communication, but it is much more like it than the first situation because the actors are attending to meaning and also listen to other actors for meaning. Given enough time, these actors might actually begin to acquire Dothraki.
So, it is certainly possible to recite in a foreign language without any acquisition taking place. Singers and actors do this all the time. Exposure to a language is not sufficient for acquisition. The input must have a certain quality, what VanPatten calls appropriate level.
We’ll take a look at that in subsequent posts.
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers and surrogate fathers out there. Teachers are often not simply legally in loco parentis but become surrogate parents and father (or mother) figures. May God bless you for all you do.