Becoming Fluent Read online

  This means that, at each point during the study of your target language, some topics and exercises will be most appropriate to your current level of expertise. Just ask Goldilocks, who found some of the bears’ porridge either too hot or too cold. Like her, you are looking for topics that are “just right,” given your current mastery of the material. The trick is to find this territory.

  The concept we’re referring to is well known in educational circles, although it has gone by different names at different times. Perhaps the first and most famous name for this concept was offered by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In the early 1930s, he coined the term “zone of proximal development” (or ZPD) to refer to the metaphorical region between what a learner can do without help, and what a learner can do only with assistance from a guide or teacher.17

  Educators also use other terms that have much the same flavor as the ZPD. For example, teachers and school psychologists talk about the concept of readiness—the cognitive state when a person will benefit from a particular educational experience. First-grade schoolchildren are not cognitively ready to study calculus, nor do they have the requisite knowledge of the mathematics that would be involved. However, they are ready to understand more concrete concepts like counting along a number line.

  Sometimes, events that are unplanned or unexpected are used to foster understanding of a concept that lies within a person’s ZPD. At the time we drafted this section of the book, the US news was dominated by the announcement that the city of Detroit had declared bankruptcy. Several commentators referred to this event as a teachable moment for understanding the economic challenges faced by large postindustrial cities in the United States. Few of us would willingly seek out arcane information about bankruptcy law, public policy, and pension obligations. However, the significance of Detroit’s bankruptcy meant that millions of people were now ready to learn more about these principles of macroeconomics.

  Another idea that is popular in educational circles is the concept of scaffolding. Just as a physical scaffold can provide support for painters and other artisans, a teacher can provide support to his or her pupils to help them master something that they can’t learn on their own. And in some fields, it’s assumed that once mastery is gained, it should be passed on to others as quickly as possible. Medical residents become familiar with the phrase “Watch one, do one, teach one.” Doctors in their residency have to learn so many procedures that they don’t have the benefit of observing, say, dozens of lumbar punctures before attempting the procedure themselves. Mastery is assumed to occur after witnessing one such operation and then a successful performance of one’s own. Once a resident has successfully performed the procedure, she then can serve as the scaffold for the next doctor in training.

  All of this has important implications for the adult foreign language learner. Although your neighbor down the street may be a native speaker of your target language and is willing to converse with you, he may assume that you will progress more quickly than you actually can. As you gain mastery of the foreign language, you’ll begin to have a sense of your strengths and weaknesses—what’s easy for you, and what typically takes you a bit more time to understand and master. You probably don’t have unlimited time to study the language, so your goal should be to use your time as efficiently as possible. This means that you’ll want to get in the zone—the zone of proximal development. If you find yourself completing exercises or engaging in conversations that are quite easy for you, it would be wise to increase the level of difficulty. And if your conversational partner is enthusiastically barreling along on a topic that’s way over your head, it’s up to you to intervene and ask to go more slowly or to provide simpler examples. Remember, just being a native speaker of a language does not make someone an effective teacher. As an adult learner you have the ability to gauge for yourself whether or not you are in the zone and make the appropriate adjustments.18

  Think about it this way: The best way to improve your tennis game is to play against someone who is just a little bit better than you are. If you play against someone worse than you are, you’ll be helping her—but you’ll never get better yourself. If you play against someone who is much better than you, then you won’t improve your game either, unless she is willing to play at a level just a little bit better than you are. Whether learning a language or playing tennis, recognizing when you are in the zone is one of the most important metacognitive skills any adult learner can develop. The ability to “think about your thinking” allows you to optimize your learning environment—on the court or in the classroom.

  3

  Aspects of Language

  I Before E / Except After C / or When Sounded as A / as in Neighbor or Weigh

  When children learn language, they learn to speak before they learn to read. Some adult foreign language learners feel that they should learn their target language in much the same way. That is, they try to ignore written language until they have mastered spoken language. This misconception no doubt appears logical to speakers of English because, in English, sounds and letters do not correspond to each other in a one-to-one fashion.

  The technical term for the relationship between sound and spelling is phoneme–grapheme correspondence. A phoneme is a sound in a language, and a grapheme is the written form for that sound. Ideally, there would be a one-to-one relationship between a sound and the letter used to represent it. English has about forty phonemes, and the Latin alphabet has only twenty-six letters, so some letters have to pull double duty. Other languages solve this problem, in part, by using diacritics—marks above or below letters to denote different sounds, such as affamé (hungry) or façade (front) in French. None of this would be a problem if English behaved consistently in this regard. But it doesn’t. English was frozen into type relatively early in its history, and wholesale changes in how the language was pronounced happened later. Other languages have changed more slowly than English, or have had their spelling overhauled to bring it in line with the spoken form. This didn’t happen with English, and therefore, the same sound can be written in a variety of ways. Some letters are silent, but only some of the time. Exceptions abound. And it is these inconsistencies that are the bane of anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language.

  The capricious nature of English spelling–sound relationships was illustrated in an example famously, but also perhaps falsely, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright.1 Consider how the word fish could be written as ghoti, given that the “f” sound can be written as “gh” in words like enough, that the “i” sound can be written as “o” as in women, and that “sh” can be written as “ti” in words like nation. In other words, just about anything goes. Based on “words” like ghoti, many people over the years have championed a wholesale reform of English spelling, and although the problem is easy to illustrate, it doesn’t admit to any easy solutions.

  In contrast, when Roger began studying German during his freshman year in high school, his teacher made a statement so outrageous that it has always stuck with him, “German is very regular. You’ll know how to pronounce almost every word that you read, even if you’ve never seen it before. And you’ll know how to spell almost every word that you hear.” This seemed like an utter impossibility—and it is, if your frame of reference is English.

  If we think about a language’s spelling and sound consistency as points on a continuum, with one endpoint denoting perfect consistency and the other denoting perfect chaos, then English could be thought of as the “Wild West.” Many languages, however, do show impressive levels of spelling and sound consistency. Finnish, Greek, the syllabary systems of Japanese, and Spanish all fare well in this regard. The spelling–sound correspondences are regular, and exceptions are few (and mostly involve foreign terms borrowed from other languages). And at other points along this spelling–sound continuum, we would find languages like Arabic, French, and Hebrew—languages that are more regular than English, but less consistent than the ideal.

&
nbsp; There are real-world consequences to a lack of correspondence between spellings and sound. Developmental studies have shown that children have more difficulty in decoding words in inconsistent languages, like English, and learn to read more slowly as a result. And as mentioned earlier, adult speakers of other languages attempting to learn English find these inconsistencies bizarre and frustrating. Nevertheless, these difficulties do not cause English speakers to stop reading or writing. And they make spelling bees possible, which aren’t needed in languages like Spanish, which have a regular phoneme–grapheme correspondence.

  Given this state of affairs, it’s no wonder that people are advised to focus solely on speaking and listening so as not to be confused by the irregularities that might be found in reading and writing a foreign language.2 However, the educational psychologist David Ausubel pointed out two reasons why written and spoken materials should be presented in tandem. First, he noted that by adolescence, the vast majority of adults are already quite proficient at learning new information through a combination of reading and listening. Consequently, it would be unnatural not to learn new material that way. Therefore, to focus only on spoken material “deprives the older learner of his principal learning tool and of the instructional medium in which he feels most comfortable and confident. This is particularly unfortunate during the early phases of instruction when learning stresses tend to be the greatest.”3

  Second, Ausubel pointed out that reading can be an invaluable support for spoken language. Especially early on in the acquisition of a new language, unfamiliar sounds and sound combinations, stress patterns, word boundaries, and grammatical structures are difficult to differentiate. Providing written materials in conjunction with spoken materials gives adult language learners additional cues with which they can make these distinctions. As students learn to speak and read concurrently, these materials can be alternated, or gradually withdrawn, when the time comes to strengthen purely spoken or purely written modes of communication.

  As you learn a new language, therefore, be sure to learn to both read and speak the language at the same time. It may seem like slow going at first (depending on the language you are learning) but at least if you are a native speaker of English, it is likely that you will find more consistency in your target language than in your native tongue. Not only will you be as amazed as Roger was to learn that spelling and sound can indeed coexist harmoniously, but you will also be reinforcing your speaking and listening through reading, and vice versa. You are already an adult who knows how to do both—why try to learn a language by denying yourself one of your obvious strengths?

  Behind the Scenes at the Foreign Service Institute

  It is only natural to compare ourselves to others. Doing so provides valuable feedback about progress. But it is important to make the proper comparisons in order to put language learning in perspective. Therefore, before thinking about your own language progress, consider the gold standard of foreign language learning: the Foreign Service Institute (FSI).

  The Foreign Service Institute is the US Department of State’s training center for diplomats and other individuals who work for the US government in the field of foreign affairs. FSI has branches in various parts of the world, but the largest by far is the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC) located in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. Each year more than 100,000 students enroll in over 700 courses at NFATC. These courses are designed to prepare Foreign Service Officers and others for their work advancing US interests at the more than 290 embassies, consulates, and other types of diplomatic missions around the world. Organized much like a university, FSI offers traditional classroom and online courses in a wide range of areas, including leadership, crisis management, diplomatic tradecraft, information technology, and safety and security.

  The Foreign Service Institute is most famous, however, for its School of Language Studies. More than seventy languages are taught at FSI (although not all are being taught at any given time). But not everyone who works at a diplomatic mission abroad receives language training. In general, language classes are provided only to those individuals serving in language designated positions (LDPs). Furthermore, not everyone going into an LDP receives the same amount of instruction. FSI measures language proficiency on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale, which describes levels of proficiency that range from 0 (no proficiency) to 5 (functionally native proficiency). Although there are several different types of proficiency (i.e., speaking, reading, listening, writing, translation performance, interpretation performance, competence in intercultural communication, and audio translation performance), LDPs are only specified for speaking (S) and reading (R). There are approximately 4,100 language designated positions worldwide, the majority of which require speaking and reading scores of 3 (general professional proficiency) which is notated as S3/R3, or called just “3-3” for short. We discuss these levels in more detail in the next section on measuring proficiency.

  As you can imagine, not everyone who will serve in an S3/R3 language designated position will study their target language for the same amount of time. The length of time designated to reach S3/R3 in any given language depends on the difficulty of the target language. Difficulty is determined by how long it should take a native speaker of English to go from no proficiency (0) to general professional proficiency (3). Diplomats studying languages such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Dutch are expected to reach S3/R3 proficiency in 24 weeks. French takes 30 weeks. Students who need to speak languages such as German, Indonesian, and Swahili receive 36 weeks of training. Languages at the next highest level of difficulty, so-called “hard” languages, such as Russian, Urdu, and Burmese, require 44 weeks of training. Finally, to get to an S3/R3 with no prior background in the so-called “super hard” languages of Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, and Korean takes almost two years (88 weeks).

  Of course, these times are only averages established by FSI based on the success rates of previous students; they are reviewed periodically and subject to change. The reason some languages are expected to take longer to master than others is complex. But in general, the more closely the language is related to English, the more quickly the language can be mastered. For example, French is more closely related to English than Thai; therefore, for an English speaker, Thai is expected to take longer than French. Likewise, Spanish uses a writing system similar to that of English, but Arabic does not. Therefore, students are expected to spend less time studying Spanish than Arabic. Other factors, too, influence the perceived level of difficulty, such as how similar the sound system of the language is to English, but you get the point.

  Because FSI is a government-funded entity, it is also evaluated periodically by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). In fiscal year (FY) 2012, the OIG reported that the success rate for students with no prior knowledge of a target language reaching a designated S3/R3 level was 60 percent. However, since most students who do not attain their desired score in the allotted time period continue to study, the overall success rate ultimately rises to 82 percent. Interestingly, two of the languages with the lowest on-time success rates were not Arabic or Chinese, but rather French and German.4

  One thing to keep in mind is that for the vast majority of language students studying at FSI, learning the target language is their full-time job. These students receive four or five hours a day of direct language instruction in classes of no more than four students, with many receiving one-to-one instruction. Because studying their target language is their full-time job, students at FSI are expected to be on campus for at least eight hours a day, using the time outside of language class for self-study. FSI also provides state-of-the-art language laboratories, a library with language learning and reference materials, and Internet-enabled classrooms. Is it any wonder, therefore, that most of these students eventually reach their language goals?

  Whether you are a student at FSI preparing for your assignment in Ti
rana, or a working parent who always wanted to learn Italian, don’t worry about whether the language is easy, hard, or super hard. In the end, the perceived difficulty of the language matters far less than your attachment to the language. If you are fascinated by China, study Chinese, and remember to cut yourself some slack if you aren’t memorizing vocabulary words as easily as your friend who is studying Spanish. And also remember that 40 percent of students at FSI, with all of the resources available to them, don’t reach the designated S3/R3 in the estimated time, but they don’t give up—and neither should you.

  Measuring Fluency and Proficiency

  Most people use the term fluency to mean how well a person speaks a foreign language. In fact, we used the term that way in the title of this book. However, linguists, educators, speech pathologists, and others define fluency more specifically, and each slightly differently, depending on their goals.5 Technically, fluency depends on rate of speech. In other words, a person is fluent in a language if he speaks it rapidly, smoothly, and accurately. The term fluency in this sense is different from proficiency, which refers to one’s competence using the language. If this seems like splitting hairs, consider the following.

  Aphasia is a general term for loss of language after brain injury.6 One type of aphasia, called nonfluent or Broca’s aphasia, is characterized by halting, effortful, and yet still meaningful speech. People with Broca’s aphasia cannot express themselves fluently; nonetheless, because they still possess knowledge of the language and are able to make themselves understood, they can be said to have retained linguistic proficiency after the brain injury. In contrast, people with fluent or Wernicke’s aphasia speak rapidly and effortlessly, but make little sense.

  Here is another example. An opera singer who has memorized the score of a libretto can sing the opera perfectly and expressively, and yet be unable to leave the opera house and hail a taxi using that language. The singer could be said to be demonstrating fluency, and yet not be proficient in the language. Likewise, a poorly educated native speaker of a language could be considered fluent, but without having attained a high level of proficiency.