How Languages are Learned Quotes

“exposure to language input provides learners with positive evidence (information about what is grammatical in the second language), it fails to give them negative evidence (information about what is not grammatical). Positive evidence is not enough to permit learners to notice the absence in the target language of elements that are present in their interlanguage (and their first language). Thus, more explicit information about what is not grammatical in the second language may be necessary for learners’ continued development. This is discussed in more detail in the section ‘Get it right in the end’.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“input flood could help them add something new to their interlanguage, but did not lead them to get rid of an error based on their first language.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Horst (2005) used simplified readers in a study of vocabulary development among adult immigrants who were enrolled in an ESL programme in a community centre in Montreal, Canada. The 21 participants represented several language backgrounds and proficiency levels. In addition to the activities of their regular ESL class, students chose simplified readers that were made available in a class library. Over a six-week period, students took books home and read them on their own. Horst developed individualized vocabulary measures so that learning could be assessed in terms of the books each student actually read. She found that there was vocabulary growth attributable to reading, even over this short period, and that the more students read, the more words they learned. She concluded that substantial vocabulary growth through reading is possible, but that students must read a great deal (more than just one or two books per semester) to realize those benefits. As we saw in Chapter 2, when we interact in ordinary conversations, we tend to use mainly the 1,000 or 2,000 most frequent words. Thus, reading is a particularly valuable source of new vocabulary. Students who have reached an intermediate level of proficiency may have few opportunities to learn new words in everyday conversation. It is in reading a variety of texts that students are most likely to encounter new vocabulary. The benefit of simplified readers is that students encounter a reasonable number of new words. This increases the likelihood that they can figure out the meaning of new words (or perhaps be motivated to look them up). If the new words occur often enough, students may remember them when they encounter them in a new context.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Just listen … and read’ is based on the hypothesis that language acquisition takes place when learners are exposed to comprehensible input through listening and/or reading. As noted in Chapter 4, the individual whose name is most closely associated with this proposal is Stephen Krashen (1985, 1989). This is a controversial proposal because it suggests that second language learners do not need to produce language in order to learn it, except perhaps to get other people to provide input by speaking to them. According to this view, it is enough to hear (or read) and understand the target language.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“1   Get it right from the beginning 2   Just listen … and read 3   Let’s talk 4   Get two for one 5   Teach what is teachable 6   Get it right in the end”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“findings suggested that the type of instruction students had experienced—isolated pattern practice drills—resulted in a developmental sequence that appeared to be different from that of learners in more natural learning environments. For a time after their instruction had focused on it, learners reliably produced a particular grammatical morpheme in its obligatory contexts. For example, after weeks of drilling on present progressive, students usually supplied both the auxiliary be and the -ing ending (for example, ‘He’s playing ball’). However, they also produced one or more of the morphemes in places where they did not belong (‘He’s want a cookie’). The same forms were produced with considerably less accuracy in obligatory contexts when they were no longer being practised in class and when the third person singular simple present -s was being drilled instead. At this point, many students appeared to revert to what looked like a developmentally earlier stage, using no tense marking at all (for example, ‘He play ball’). These findings provided evidence that an almost exclusive focus on accuracy and practice of particular grammatical forms does not mean that learners will be able to use the forms correctly outside the classroom drill setting, nor that they will continue to use them correctly once other forms are introduced. Not surprisingly, this instruction, that depended on repetition and drill of decontextualized sentences, did not seem to favour the development of comprehension, fluency, or communicative abilities either.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“learners’ beliefs about the kind of instruction that is best can influence their satisfaction and success. The grammar translation approach is useful for the study of grammar and vocabulary and can be valuable for understanding important cultural texts. The audiolingual approach with its emphasis on speaking and listening was used successfully with highly motivated adult learners in intensive training programmes for government personnel in the United States. However, there is little classroom research to support such approaches for students in ordinary school programmes that must serve the needs of students who bring different levels of motivation and aptitude to the classroom.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“In a longitudinal study, Kelleen Toohey (2000) observed a group of children aged 5–7 in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 in Vancouver, Canada. The group included children who were native speakers of English, as well as children whose home language was Cantonese, Hindi, Polish, Punjabi, or Tagalog. All the children were in the same class, and English was the medium of instruction. Toohey identified three classroom practices that led to the separation of the ESL children. First, the ESL children’s desks were placed close to the teacher’s desk, on the assumption that they needed more direct help from the teacher. Some of them were also removed from the classroom twice a week to obtain assistance from an ESL teacher. Second, instances in which the ESL learners interacted more with each other usually involved borrowing or lending materials but this had to be done surreptitiously because the teacher did not always tolerate it. Finally, there was a ‘rule’ in the classroom that children should not copy one another’s oral or written productions. This was particularly problematic for the ESL children because repeating the words of others was often the only way in which they could participate in conversational interaction. According to Toohey, these classroom practices led to the exclusion of ESL students from activities and associations in school and also in the broader community in which they were new members. Furthermore, such practices did not contribute positively to the children’s ESL development.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“part of the children’s language socialization experience at home included parents negatively portraying their own experiences at school, expressing fears about their children’s ability to succeed and raising fundamental questions about the value of school in their lives. The researcher concludes that these factors were central in contributing to the children’s lack of continued cognitive and linguistic development in school.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“learners receiving intensive ESL instruction for five hours every day for five months of one school year (in Grade 5 or 6) were compared to learners at the end of secondary school who had received the same total amount of instruction spread over 7–8 years of schooling. On a number of measures, the students who received the intensive instruction performed as well as or better than those whose instruction was delivered in what has been called a ‘drip feed’ approach (Lightbown and Spada 1994). In subsequent research, comparisons were made between groups of Grade 5 and 6 students who participated in intensive English language instruction during a single school year, but with the time distributed differently: some students received five hours of English a day for five months; others received the same total number of hours, doing two and a half hours of English each day for 10 months. The researchers found that both groups benefited from the overall increase in hours of instruction with some additional advantages for learners receiving the more intensive instruction (Collins et al. 1999; Collins and White 2011). The advantages were evident not only in superior language abilities but also in attitudes toward the language and satisfaction with language learning experiences. Similar findings have been reported for different models of intensive and core French programmes (Netten and Germain 2004; Lapkin, Hart, and Harley 1998).”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“McCormick and Donato identified six functions of scaffolding (for example, drawing the novice’s attention to the task, and simplifying or limiting the task demands). The researchers examined another function—the teacher’s use of questions during scaffolded interactions—and how it contributed to class participation and learner comprehension. In the example below, they argue that the teacher’s use of the display question ‘Who usually lives in palaces?’ serves an important pedagogic function because it draws the learners’ attention to the word ‘palace’ through the display question and facilitates the learners’ comprehension of the word.   T Palace?   S1 Like castle?   S2 Special place, very good.   S3 Very nice.   T Castle, special place, very nice. Who usually lives in palaces?   SS Kings.   T Kings, and queens, princes and princesses.   SS Yeah   S4 Maybe beautiful house?   T Big, beautiful house, yeah, really big. McCormick and Donato suggest that questions should be examined within the framework of scaffolded interaction and with reference to the teacher’s goals in a particular lesson or interaction.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“More recently, however, a re-evaluation of display questions has taken place. This is based on the observation that there are different ways in which display questions can be asked in classrooms. One is for the teacher to ask a series of questions in a drill-like format such as ‘Do you have a brother?’, ‘Does he have a brother?’, ‘Do you have a sister?’, ‘Does she have a sister?’ In this context, display questions do not have a meaningful or communicative purpose. In other contexts, however, display questions can serve important pedagogic and interaction functions.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“recasts containing ‘prosodic stress were thirteen times more likely to result in successful uptake”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“These findings and those from other research led Lyster and Mori to propose the counterbalance hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, feedback is more likely to be noticed if learners are oriented in a direction that is opposite to what they have become accustomed to in their instructional environment. One example of this would be that learners who receive L2 instruction that is focused on meaning/content need feedback that directs their attention to form more explicitly.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“because the Japanese learners’ attention was regularly drawn to form, they were primed to notice the corrective function of recasts. In the more meaning-oriented French immersion classes, however, recasts were less likely to signal to the learner that the teacher was responding to a language error. Thus is likely that learners assumed that the teachers’ recast was simply a confirmation of what they had said.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“learning a second language in a non-instructional setting is different from learning in the classroom. Many believe that learning ‘on the street’ is more effective. This belief may be based on the fact that most successful learners have had experience using the language outside the classroom. What is special about this ‘natural’ language learning? Can we create the same environment in the classroom? Should we? Or are there essential contributions that only instruction and not natural exposure can provide?”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“hypothesis was influenced by cognitive theory, but more recent work has been motivated by sociocultural theory. Using the term collaborative dialogue, Swain and Lapkin and their colleagues have carried out a series of studies to determine how second language learners co-construct linguistic knowledge while engaging in production tasks (i.e. speaking and writing) that simultaneously draw their attention to form and meaning. As shown in Communication task B in Chapter 5, learners were testing hypotheses about the correct forms to use, discussing them together and deciding what forms were best to express their meaning.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“ACCESS (Automatization in Communicative Contexts of Essential Speech Segments). It draws on the cognitive perspective and is based on classroom activities which, by their nature, require learners to use meaningful units of language repetitively in contexts where there are genuine exchanges of meaning. The goal is to provide opportunities for using these units with sufficient frequency that they will become automatic. Segalowitz (2010) has emphasized the importance of increasing the amount of language that can be used automatically, thus freeing more cognitive resources for learning new things. Paul Nation (2007) has suggested that automaticity, which he, like Segalowitz, refers to as ‘fluency’ may be the most neglected aspect of language teaching in contexts where instruction focuses primarily on meaning.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“The question of whether learners must be aware that they are ‘noticing’ something in the input is the object of considerable debate. According to information processing theories, anything that uses up our mental ‘processing space’, even if we are not aware of it or attending to it intentionally, can contribute to learning. From a usage-based perspective, the likelihood of acquisition is best predicted by the frequency with which something is available for processing, not by the learner’s awareness of something in the input.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Richard Schmidt (1990, 2001) proposed the noticing hypothesis, suggesting that nothing is learned unless it has been ‘noticed’. Noticing does not itself result in acquisition, but it is the essential starting point. From this perspective, comprehensible input does not lead to growth in language knowledge unless the learner becomes aware of a particular language feature.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Other studies have measured the electrical activity in brain waves to explore differences in the processing of language input. Some of this research has shown that as an L2 learner’s proficiency increases, the brain activity looks more like that of first language processing.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“recent brain imaging studies show activation in different locations in both hemispheres of the brain during language processing. This is true for both first and second languages. However, differences have been observed, depending on the learners’ age and level of proficiency. For example, when learners who acquire a second language later in life are given a grammatical task to complete, they show activation in the same neural areas that are activated for L1 processing but also activation in other areas of the brain. This is not the case with younger learners who show activation only in the areas for L1 processing (Beretta 2011).”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“language is learned through our perceptual and cognitive experiences and that like all other aspects of learning, language learning involves the discovery, categorization, and determination of patterns through the use of language.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“As suggested by Nick Ellis (2003, 2005) and others, language is at least partly learned in units larger than single words, and sentences or phrases are not usually put together one word at a time. As noted in Chapter 1, usage-based research has shown that a learning mechanism, simulated by a computer program, can not only ‘learn’ from input but can also generalize, even making overgeneralization errors.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Nick Ellis (2002) explains, the emphasis is on the frequency with which learners encounter specific linguistic features in the input and the frequency with which language features occur together. According to this view, learners develop a stronger and stronger network of associations or connections between these features as well as between language features and the contexts in which they occur. Eventually, the presence of one situational or linguistic feature will activate the other(s) in the learner’s mind. For example, learners might get subject–verb agreement correct, not because they know a rule but because they have heard examples such as ‘I say’ and ‘he says’ so often that each subject pronoun activates the correct verb form.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“According to transfer-appropriate processing (TAP), information is best retrieved in situations that are similar to those in which it was acquired (Lightbown 2008b). This is because when we learn something our memories also record aspects of the context in which it was learned and even the cognitive processes involved in the way we learned it, for example, by reading or hearing it. To date, most of the research on transfer-appropriate processing has been done in laboratory experiments, for example, comparing the learning of word lists under different conditions. However, the hypothesis seems to offer a plausible way of explaining a widely observed phenomenon in second language learning: knowledge that is acquired mainly in rule learning or drill activities may be easier to access on tests that resemble the learning activities than in communicative situations. On the other hand, if learners’ attention is drawn to grammatical forms during communicative activities in which their cognitive resources are occupied with a focus on meaning, the retrieval of those forms on a grammar test may be more difficult.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“Sometimes changes in language behaviour do not seem to be explainable in terms of a gradual build-up of fluency through practice. These changes have been described in terms of restructuring (McLaughlin 1990). They seem to be based on some qualitative change in the learner’s knowledge. Restructuring may account for what appear to be bursts of progress, when learners suddenly seem to ‘put it all together’, even though they have not had any new instruction or apparently relevant exposure to the language. It may also explain apparent backsliding, when a systematic aspect of a learner’s language incorporates too much or incorporates the wrong things. For example, as we saw in Chapter 2, when a learner finally masters the use of the regular -ed ending to show past tense, irregular verbs that had previously been used correctly may be affected. Thus, after months of saying ‘I saw a film’, the learner may say ‘I seed’ or even ‘I sawed’. Such overgeneralization errors are not based on practice of those specific items but rather on their integration into a general pattern.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“According to this perspective, once skills become automatized, thinking about the declarative knowledge while trying to perform the skill actually disrupts the smooth performance of it. Think, for example, of trying to drive a car or skate while intentionally thinking about and preparing every move. With enough practice, procedural knowledge eclipses the declarative knowledge, which, in time, may be forgotten. For this reason, fluent speakers may not even realize that they once possessed the declarative knowledge that set the process in motion.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“most learning, including language learning, starts with declarative knowledge, that is, knowledge that we are aware of having, for example, a grammar rule. The hypothesis is that, through practice, declarative knowledge may become procedural knowledge, or the ability to use the knowledge. With continued practice, the procedural knowledge can become automatized and the learner may forget having learned it first as declarative knowledge.”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned

“For proficient speakers, choosing words, pronouncing them, and stringing them together with the appropriate grammatical markers is essentially automatic. Furthermore, much of what these speakers say is drawn from predictable patterns of language that are at least partly formulaic. That is, fluent speakers do not create new sentences by choosing one word at a time but rather by using strings of words that typically occur together. This use of patterns applies not only to idiomatic expressions, but also to much conversational language and written language in a specific genre (Ellis, Simpson-Vlach, and Maynard 2008).”
― Patsy M. Lightbown, How Languages are Learned