Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  Research suggests that the efficacy of the central executive reaches its peak during one’s twenties, and declines thereafter, although perhaps not as much as previously thought.7 This has important implications for the adult language learner. By its very nature, language production involves several cognitive processes unfolding at once. When you are speaking, for example, you must keep track of what you’re trying to say, retrieving the appropriate words from memory and monitoring your listener’s face for signs of comprehension or confusion. Although this process may seem almost effortless in one’s native language, when speaking a nonnative language, the cognitive load (the amount of information that must be processed to complete the task) can severely tax the central executive.

  Changes in the central executive also have implications for the process by which a new language is learned. Minimizing distractions and attention switching during study can decrease cognitive load. It’s all too easy to check one’s e-mail while completing a language exercise on the computer, but it would probably be best to avoid this kind of temptation. All of us seem to believe that we are efficient multitaskers, but the truth is that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think, and this ability does decline over time.8 Finally, most foreign language materials are designed for high school and college students, and so they may be less appropriate for someone in their forties or fifties: the multimedia bells and whistles that are used to appeal to a younger audience may simply be distracting and unhelpful.

  Deep Thoughts

  Our ability to remember our previous experiences can be quite impressive most of the time, but as we all know, it can also be rather fickle. Why is it, for example, that we can have trouble remembering something important, like where we parked the car, and yet be able to effortlessly remember the lyrics of songs that we haven’t heard in years, and don’t even like? Why do some things seem to “stick” in memory, while others do not?

  An important part of the story may be how we think about the information that we later try to remember. According to an approach called depth of processing, one determinant of later memory is the mental operations that we perform as we learn something. In a classic experiment, Craik and Tulving asked participants questions about words that they were being shown. For example, participants might see the word cloud and be asked, “Is the word printed in capital letters?” or “Does the word rhyme with weight?” Such questions can be answered based on the superficial characteristics of the words themselves (how they’re printed, how they sound), and without reflection on the words’ underlying meaning. Therefore, only what is called shallow processing is required to answer the question.9

  However, for other words, the participants in the study had no choice but to reflect on deeper aspects of the concepts that the words represented. To continue our example, some participants who saw the word cloud were asked “Is the word a type of fish?” while others were asked “Would the word fit the sentence ‘He met a _________ in the street?’” It’s impossible to answer these types of questions without reflecting, at least to some degree, on the conceptual characteristics of clouds (“they’re up in the sky, not swimming in a lake or walking around on the ground”).

  After exposing their participants to a series of such words and questions, the researchers presented them with a set of words, and asked them to identify those that they had seen during the first phase of the study. Craik and Tulving predicted that participants’ recall would be based on the type of task they had engaged in: Those who had been asked about cloud in the deeper conditions should have better memory for the word cloud than the participants who had been asked about cloud in the more shallow conditions.

  As predicted, there was a robust depth of processing effect. For the participants who thought about whether the word had been printed in capital letters, memory was quite poor—these words were recognized, on average, just 16 percent of the time. At the other extreme, when participants were asked whether the word fit in a particular sentence, recognition accuracy was impressively high—90 percent of the words presented in that condition were recognized.

  Although the depth of processing approach is not without its critics, cognitive scientists still draw upon it as a useful conceptual framework.10 And it has important implications for the study of a new language. For example, many students believe that reading aloud in a foreign language improves their speaking and reading ability, as well as their expressive fluency. And while this may be helpful to some degree, it should be clear that this is a shallow task. Since the students are focusing almost exclusively on how to correctly pronounce the words, they aren’t processing the texts deeply, and their memory for the vocabulary and the content of these passages will probably be quite poor.

  In a similar way, the act of parroting back what has just been heard in a rote memory task is also shallow. It would be much better, as a deeper task, to paraphrase what you’ve heard, because in this way, you must grapple directly with the meaning of the words, and not just what they sound like.

  Finally, some students believe that writing a word over and over creates “muscle memory,” which may lead to superior retention for this word. Once again, however, such repetition is inherently shallow and fails to make contact with the deeper levels of processing that will create a more durable representation in long-term memory. Breaking the word apart into its meaningful components, for example, would be a deeper task. So a student studying German and encountering the word Schadenfreude would be well advised to try and recognize its component parts (Schaden = “to hurt,” Freude = “joy”) in order to learn and remember the concept’s meaning (taking pleasure in the misfortune of others), rather than merely writing it repeatedly.

  Allow Me to Elaborate

  The contrast between shallow and deep processing has implications for two different strategies that people use to try to remember information. Back when people had to call the operator for a telephone number, if they didn’t have a pencil handy, they listened to the number and then just repeated it over and over: “555-1212, 555-1212, 555-1212” until the last digit was dialed. This worked just fine, unless the line was busy or the person didn’t answer. In that case, they had to call the operator back to ask for the number again. (When Richard did this he would try to disguise his voice.)

  Obviously, this strategy, which is known as maintenance rehearsal, is a very ineffective way to retain any information, and yet that is precisely how many people try to learn new information. They simply cycle it through working memory, never processing it more deeply. It’s no wonder, therefore, that it fades so quickly.

  In contrast, elaborative rehearsal strategies allow one to process information at a deeper level, more effectively transferring information from working memory into long-term memory. Elaborative rehearsal strategies include focusing on meaning. For example, to memorize vocabulary words, rather than simply maintaining them in working memory through repetition, better, more elaborative strategies would include paraphrasing, thinking about how the word connects to other words in your vocabulary, or thinking about how the word relates to yourself. Although you may end up studying fewer words per day, with elaborative rehearsal, the ones you do study will be more meaningful, and therefore more likely to be remembered and used correctly.

  In addition, when rehearsing elaboratively, don’t forget to take into account the zone of proximal development that was discussed in chapter 2. As you review information, such as vocabulary, grammatical structures, or idiomatic expressions, some items will seem ripe for you to learn. Pick this low-hanging fruit, if you will, and incorporate, through elaboration, the new material into what you already know. With this new, expanded knowledge, you’ll have prepared yourself to tackle even more advanced material and expanded your zone of proximal development. In short, elaborate on what you know. As Ausubel famously advised: “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.”11

  Learning ve
rsus Relearning

  Some of you may be reading this book because you want to relearn a foreign language that you studied previously. Perhaps twenty or thirty years ago, you studied a language in high school or college and would like to become fluent in that language now. But after such a long gap between the first time you tried to learn that language and now, could restarting on the language really be considered relearning? After all, it may seem like you’ve forgotten everything you ever knew about that language, and that trying to relearn it after thirty years would essentially mean starting from scratch. But is that really the case?

  As it turns out, some of the very first studies ever conducted on human memory were about relearning. In the early 1880s, a German researcher named Herman Ebbinghaus examined the processes of learning and forgetting. This may sound a bit peculiar at first—you either know something or you don’t, right? However, that isn’t really the case. If you run into an old acquaintance on the street, you may be able to recognize him (“I know that face is familiar”), but you may not be able to recall how you know that person, or what his name is. In other words, memory includes both recognition and recall. In the case of recognition, all that’s required is some feeling of familiarity (“I know that I used to know this person”). Recognition memory is typically excellent, even after several decades. Recall is harder, because it requires actually reproducing information, such as your acquaintance’s name.

  Ebbinghaus is famous for having proposed that there is also a third way of measuring memory.12 There’s recall and recognition, but there is also relearning. Ebbinghaus reasoned that if you are able to memorize something that you once used to know faster than you can memorize something that you’ve never learned before, then something must have been kept in your long-term memory—even if you cannot consciously recall it (like your acquaintance’s name). We’re going to describe one of Ebbinghaus’s experiments in some detail, because it’s historically important, ingenious in design, and directly relevant to our original question about relearning something like one’s high school French.

  To begin with, of course, Ebbinghaus needed to find something to learn. He didn’t want to memorize meaningful material, like passages from books, because he was concerned that prior knowledge of the topic or associations to other material might make the study’s results difficult to interpret. Instead, he invented and used an entirely new type of memory stimulus: the nonsense syllable. A nonsense syllable is simply a random combination of a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant, like baf, zup, or tej. These three-letter sequences aren’t words in English (or German, for that matter), but they are wordlike in that they are pronounceable and can be memorized as if they were words. Importantly for Ebbinghaus, nonsense syllables have no prior associations, and therefore can be used as a measure of “pure” memory. Ebbinghaus created several hundred of these nonsense syllables, and inscribed them on cards to be used in his studies. (In a way, Ebbinghaus’s method of memorizing nonsense syllables from cards is very much like foreign language learners’ method of trying to memorize unfamiliar vocabulary words using index cards.)

  Over a period of two years, Ebbinghaus conducted more than 160 trials of his experiment, using himself as a subject. Here is how a trial in Ebbinghaus’s experiment unfolded. He selected one of his decks of cards at random (let’s say it’s deck no. 23), noted the time, and began to study the nonsense syllables. His goal was to learn them well enough to be able to recite the list from memory twice without making any mistakes. If he made a mistake, he would go back to studying the syllables until he was ready to attempt his recitation again. Eventually, he would achieve his goal, and he wrote down how long it took, which he called the original learning time.

  Later, he would try to relearn the same list. He varied the amount of time that elapsed between the original learning and this relearning. The shortest interval was twenty minutes, and the longest was an entire month. In our example, let’s imagine that a week has gone by, and he is trying to relearn deck 23. He did this in the exact same way as he had learned the deck the first time—and recorded the time it took. This was now a measure of his relearning time for the list.

  As you probably have guessed by now, Ebbinghaus was an extremely dedicated and careful researcher. (He must have also been someone who didn’t get bored very easily.) After two years of patient memorization and recitation, he had enough data to describe the relearning process.

  Ebbinghaus quantified his performance by subtracting the relearning time from the original learning time, and then converting this number to a percentage, which he called his savings. When he looked at the data he had collected, he found that most forgetting takes place almost immediately (see figure 7.1). This forgetting curve shows that just twenty minutes after learning a list of nonsense syllables perfectly, his savings was only about 60 percent. After an hour, this number falls to about 44 percent. And after nine hours, the savings was down to 36 percent.

  Figure 7.1

  Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve.

  Now, if that trend were to continue, the result should be that Ebbinghaus would have forgotten everything he had learned in just a couple of days. But that isn’t what happened. As you can see by looking at the chart, the amount that Ebbinghaus forgot, after dropping dramatically at first, began to level off. After one day, his savings was down to about 34 percent. After two days, it had dropped to about 28 percent. And after six days, the savings had fallen to 25 percent. After that, declines were negligible all the way to the longest time interval that Ebbinghaus used: at 31 days after learning a particular deck of nonsense syllables, he still had 21 percent savings (see figure 7.1).

  Although other psychologists went on to replicate Ebbinghaus’s research in different settings and with different types of materials, they all found a similar result—that although most forgetting takes place soon after learning, the material that does remain is available, even over long periods of time. Larry Squire and Pamela Slater, for example, studied participants’ ability to recognize the names of TV programs and racehorses that they had been exposed to during a fifteen-year period (from the late 1950s to the early 1970s).13 As Ebbinghaus would have predicted, these subjects displayed a gradual rate of forgetting over the years after having learned the information.

  What should we make of this result? Like much of the research we discuss in this book, there is both good news and bad news. The bad news is that the process of forgetting kicks in immediately after we’re exposed to something, and like sand through our fingers, most of this information just slips away. The good news is that this rate of forgetting slows considerably as time goes by. And keep in mind that this is just one way of measuring forgetting. As we will see, recognition memory can be excellent even many decades after learning something.14 In addition, Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables in his research. And although vocabulary words in a foreign language may seem like nonsense syllables at first, they eventually become associated with concepts and therefore stop being just “nonsense,” which also makes them easier to relearn.

  The encouraging conclusion for the adult language learner is that any previous exposure to a foreign language can be helpful when relearning that language. Although you may think that you have no memory for any of the vocabulary of a foreign language you learned in high school or college, that experience means that you’ll be able to relearn those vocabulary words faster than someone who has never been exposed to that language.

  Cognitive Overload

  Earlier in this chapter we mentioned the concept of cognitive load. As you may recall, cognitive load refers to how much information can be manipulated in working memory at a given time. We also discussed the ways in which researchers have tried to quantify exactly how much information can be effectively processed in working memory. Although estimates vary, one can easily see that the complex task of learning a new language places huge cognitive demands on working memory. When the cognitive load imposed on working memory becomes too great, we end up in
a state of cognitive overload, which means that a person is no longer able to use working memory effectively to accomplish the task at hand. Moreover, to compensate for cognitive overload, a person may focus on simple aspects that are related to the task, but which do not actually add to learning in any meaningful way. For example, if you are listening to a person speak very rapidly in your target language, you may stop focusing on trying to understand what the person is saying, and instead focus on how they are saying it—such as paying attention to their accent or gestures. Clearly, cognitive overload interferes with learning.

  Unfortunately, everyone learning a new language will experience cognitive overload. When this happens, it’s important to recognize the situation for what it is and not to give up or blame yourself, the language, or the teacher. There are ways to manage the cognitive load that comes with learning a new language.

  Cognitive Overload from Factors Internal to Language

  Cognitive overload can happen because language is inherently complex. Although not much can be done to alter the internal workings of a particular language, it is still possible to manage the demands placed on working memory that come from learning a language.

  One way to manage the cognitive load in language learning tasks is to break the task down into smaller subunits that are easier to process mentally. For example, reading Japanese is notoriously difficult. But the task of reading Japanese can be subdivided. Because Japanese has borrowed more than 20,000 words from English—loanwords such as conbini for convenience store and beddo for bed—teachers of Japanese often start by having students learn these words. In Japanese, borrowed words are written in a special script called katakana. Katakana is the easiest of the three Japanese scripts for English speakers to learn because once they can sound out the word, they often (but not always) know what it means. In terms of cognitive load, learning katakana is less taxing on working memory than learning hiragana (which is used for purely Japanese words), or kanji, which are symbols based on Chinese characters.