Summary Details
| Query: |
Language Acquisition Outside Formal Education
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| Author: | tomasz wisniewski | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Language Acquisition
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| Summary: |
Some time ago (12.2039, 13 Aug 2001) I posted a query
about language acquisition outside school in traditional societies. I wanted to know something about the method, specifically whether there are real lessons i.e. time set apart for study with artificial situations created for the student, whether the teacher follows any system (e.g. by concentrating on one area of life), whether the teacher corrects mistakes, etc. >From the responses I received it became clear that there is no single answer, because people may learn a foreign language which is normally used within their community, or a language of a separate but neigboring community, and then they are not exposed to the language as often, and when they learn it they don't use it as much. In the former case, people often grow up multi-lingual, and if not, they acquire other languages without being taught; in the latter case there is teaching involved. The method does not involve grammar theory at all. Teaching is usually by sentences, with very few basic words taught separately. The sentences are not analyzed, or even divided into words. The teaching follows rather topics than structures. Only serious mistakes are corrected. Most of what I have been able to learn I owe to Mr. George Grace, who referred to similar methods in his on-line paper, and supplied me with quotes, and Mr. Russell Schuh, who sent me some of his own observations. I am very grateful for their help. Below I quote their letters (with some editing), if there are any mistakes I made them while copying. George Grace wrote: I think the best way to answer your questions is with quotations from the works I referred to. I don't know where else in the world similar methods may be employed. I'm inclined to expect them to be common, but would also expect Western scholars with their dedication to the grammar-lexicon model to overlook (or misinterpret) them. I think the following quotations from Laycock's and Thurston's works answer your questions about as well as I know how. Laycock 91. ''But a more interesting question is that of the acquisition of a foreign language on the part of an adult, especially in circumstances other than migration to a new language community. I know of no references to this in the literature, so an observation of my own may be useful. In 1971 two Papua New Guineans and I arrived in the evening in an Abau-speaking village of the upper Sepik. ... My two companions decided to learn Abau while sitting around the fire in the evening, from an elderly villager who came to talk tous. Teaching proceeded by means of whole sentences and occasional individual lexical items, either volunteered by the Abau speaker or requested by [one of the others]'' {Laycock offers from memory an approximation of the conversation. It begins with requests for betel and tobacco. He reports that only gross errors were corrected.} 91. ''No attempt was made to explain any of the morphology (especially the pronoun cross-referencing and tense/aspect system in verbs, which is complex but different in all three languages involved), or to separate out individual words from the sentences, except in the case of important nouns (sago, tobacco, areca nut, betel pepper, fire, water), which were often taught individually. ''92. ''All the sentences taught related to friendly, but nonintimate, socializing: requests for food and relaxants (tobacco, areca), greetings, and polite interest (''What village are you from?''). ''92. ''But it seems likely that this method of teaching by whole sentences of potential use--the phrase-book method--is the normal one in Papua New Guinea; my own informants commonly adopted this method during eliciting.'' Thurston 68. ''The people of NWNB are experienced language teachers with their own ideas about language instruction. That their language teaching is rule-governed became apparent to us only after we had begun collecting data in all the languages. The methods Goulden and I had initially devised for the elicitation of data turned out to be partly at odds with the established procedures used by our informants to present their languages to outsiders. In subsequent encounters with new informants, the same patterns emerged over and over again.'' 68. ''Language teaching proceeds according to a set of formulae. The first individual words offered by informants always include: 'betel, betel pepper, lime powder, fire' and 'tobacco'. Typically, as each of these words is given, it is included in a few common sentences, all of which are requests.... The student is then required to drill the complete sentence until it is correct and fluent. Later, the student can expect to be tested in public by virtually anyone. If s/he fails, people get embarrassed, because this implies that the instructors have been lax in their duties...'' {The first sentences are requests for betel, tobacco, etc.} 69. ''...that these sentences are offered first indicates what is perceived as the primary function of language in the area--it is most important for initiating and maintaining human relationships. One of the first things people do after greeting is share betel or tobacco. Requesting betel and/or tobacco is a sign of trust, ...'' 70. ''The next step in learning a language in NWNB involves requesting food, usually starting with taro,'' 70. ''The subsequent stages in language instruction are less neatly ordered, but pertain to aspects of daily activities.'' 72-3. ''The New Britain concept of language instruction is highly systematicin that the language taught follows the progression of social use parallel to the socialisation of the student into the linguistic group. The process begins with the formulae appropriate to the interactional needs of first greeting, leading eventually to the subtle insinuations needed to tease afriend. At all stages, the language taught is governed by its use in actual social situations.'' Russell Schuh wrote: I can address your question only from what I have observed in Africa. Most Africans are at least bilingual, and many are multi-lingual. Until the last 3 or 4 decades, most had no formal schooling, and many still do not. People become multi-lingual in Africa for practical reasons--trade, intermarriage, socio-political reasons (e.g. leaders must be able to communicate with their people, who often speak a variety of languages), etc. I have never seen any evidence that people approach learning languages in a systematic way, setting aside special times, creating language exercises, and the like. People who are exposed to several languages as children acquire their non-native (or maybe better, non-home) languages like children acquire any language--they are mentally equipped to do it. This is probably the most common situation, i.e. children will have playmates of a variety of backgrounds and they just talk to each other in the most convenient language(s). People who acquire other languages once they become teenagers and adults seem to do it by being exposed to the language in sort of constrained circumstances, for example, in a work environment or a market, where they hear and use the same phrases over and over. Once they pick up the ability to hear and understand conversations on limited topics, then they can fairly easily expand their range of vocabulary and useful expressions. In terms of what they are doing as they acquire--learning words, learning sentences, learning grammar--I'd say they probably learn sort of globally. What I am sure of is that they do not earn list of words divorced from their use in context and they do not explicitly learn grammar rules. Unlike those of us who have learned foreign languages in schools and can recite grammatical rules, whereas we may not be able to do this for our native languages, multi-lingual Africans would have no more idea about the grammar of their 2nd, 3rd, 4th language than they would about their native language. Mr. Schuh also commented on a method often associated with unwritten languages, which has been (probably successfully) used by missionaries and anthropologists. I'm sure that ''pointing and naming'' is NOT a method of language learning in societies such as this. Surely people would do this if they needed to know the name of something, but it would probably almost always be for the practical reason of needing its name so that they could say something about it, not just to build a larger repertoire of vocabulary or to practice without some broader purpose. Tomasz Wisniewski tomwisn@yahoo.com |
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| LL Issue: | 12.2378 | |
| Date Posted: | 25-Sep-2001 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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