Language Learning Expert: How To Really Learn Languages (Input Is Not Enough!)

in today's interview I talk with Dr Jonathan Newton and we talked about how to learn languages and uh on your own or maybe using tutors for example so uh Dr Jonathan Newton is an associate professor uh in the school of linguistics and applied language studies at the Victoria University of Wellington and he's the program director for the master of Applied Linguistics uh we talked about a bunch of things namely the gap between language uh study and language use we also talked about using tutors for learning languages uh we talked about input is input sufficient to

learn languages or do you need to do something else uh we talked about the importance of vocabulary for language future uses of artificial intelligence for learning languages and much more I hope that you enjoy this interview so Jonathan could you introduce yourself to people and keep in mind that my listeners are most just you know average people trying to learn languages whether it be in a classroom or on their own yeah sure my name is Jonathan Newton I work at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand I've been involved in language teaching since the 19

I began my career in China teaching at a university without any prior experience sort of had to learn on the job so to speak and really uh was excited by that experience and wanted to know more so came back to New Zealand to get a post-graduate diploma in um in language teaching with the intention of going back to China to keep teaching but you know life caught up on me and took me in different directions and I'm still here but I've spent a lot of time in the last 30 years working in Asia in and

out of Asia working in uh with language teachers in Malaysia China and Vietnam Thailand Cambodia Japan so I've um you know I'm always interested in getting alongside teachers in different contexts and finding out what they do why they do it how they do it and learning from them and then sharing those ideas back with other teachers so yeah my that's me and I'm really you know I'm really interested in teachers and teaching right and so we're talking specifically about language teaching so I suppose the end goal would be optimizing how teachers teach in the classroom

so that students can learn as much as possible is that correct yeah for sure right and so I think among my listeners what I've been able to see is that a lot of people learn languages on their own but there are also a lot of people who are wondering well okay maybe it's better for me to actually take a class or you know go go to college or something like that to to learn a language and so I guess my first question to get started would be for people who want to learn a language and

they want to do it the more let's say formal way with textbooks and in a classroom not on your own what would you recommend that they do let me pull back a bit from that question and just reflect on the difference between learning by yourself and learning in a collaborative context with with other Learners and perhaps with a teacher guiding you and my own experience I'm actually currently learning French through Joy lingo just as a kind of s that I've always got the experience of learning another language while I talk to teachers about languages and

I find that after a couple of years of you know every day studying a little bit of French if I try to say anything in French or have a conversation in French I'm just completely lost because the mode of my study doesn't reflect the mode of my use of the language so I'm I'm studying it you know app but then the use is some kind of live communication which involves identity and ego and communicative needs and all these kind of things and you know I mean there's a really simple principle from psychology called um transfer

appropriate processing it sounds a bit abstract tap transfer appropriate processing it means that the mode in which you practice is the mode in which you will be able to perform so you and I think this is even if you're learning if you're a learner learning by yourself and you're studying grammar and exercise books and doing a lot of listening and then you think huh how come I've put all these hours into studying the language and then I try to use it and I feel like I've learned nothing right it's because the study mode doesn't reflect

the use mode I mean you can you know if there are any parents watching this who who you know are guiding their kids their students their kids or children at school and it's the same principle you know my I had a my daughter when she was studying for school she would be studying for exams by reading and I would say to her so what are you do in the exam do you read and she say no of course not I write I said okay well if you want to study for the exam you got to

write and it's a same with language learning sure you know vocab flashcards and activ you know and and grammar study and so forth they're all great but they're preliminary you've got to build into your practice active modes of use and it's is such a such a truism it's so obvious and yet I think it speaks to the experience of many Learners they find such a huge appap between the investment they put into study and their capacity to use what they've studied does that make sense yeah absolutely I guess my worry in in the beginning especially

when you're getting started with a language is if you talk a lot or well I guess you're not talking a lot if you're doing these activities you're asking the tutor to be a conversation partner and sort of f fill in the gaps but wouldn't this be wouldn't you have too many opportunities to make mistakes and then I forgot what the term is I talked about this with uh Bill Van Patton something called fossilization or fossilization filiz stabilization it's it's called stabilization these days because the the metaphor of a fossil is kind of as negative for

language Learners it feels like it's it's hard as rock and you can't change the mistakes feels that way yeah yeah so stabilization and I suppose my question is this has always been a concern of mine and essentially when I ask a question about stabilization with buildin Patton he essentially responded that it's not necessarily a real thing in the sense that it may be the case that people keep making the same mistakes over time just because they don't really care essentially they don't you know they're they're able to communicate and that's fine for them what is

your opinion on this on stabilization and is this a real concern in the classroom but also for language Learners I think it's an over people are overly concerned with it and I think there's a confusion here or lack of understanding about the balance of accuracy fluency and complexity and you know the the stabilization issue I mean it's a real issue but it's an issue of accuracy and it neglects if people are overly concerned with accuracy they're not going to get opportunities for fluency development so the kind of conversation um that we're talking about is where

look you know if it's one to one it's low stakes you're my tutor I can make as many mistakes as I like I'm just going to try and start using the language I'm going to try and get the language into my mouth and out of my mouth and I'm going to struggle and my pronounciation is going to be awful and I'm going to use terrible language but I've got to break the barrier of getting that language lubricated in my productive facilities right now alongside that when I'm outside of the onetoone shooing system I'm going to

be session I'm going to be working with a grammar book I'm going to be you know doing reading where I'm seeing standardized language so that's where I'm getting the accuracy in the standardization and after a few sessions with the tutor the tutor can start giving me a little bit of more feedback know okay here's here's something you can say here or here's a way you can pay attention to your pronunciation but I think the the real danger here is that you you have a session where you're trying to communicate and the tutor keeps on correcting

every mistake you make well what's the consequence of that you're not want to going to come back it's just so you know accuracy complexity fluency so you know opportunities for fluency development and this is where the this is where the learner's identity emotions ego well-being are all kind of compounded with language where they struggle to use the language if I was to use French with you now it would be completely embarrassing I would be absolutely humble by the experience and you would be listening to me and thinking my God this guy's guy's hopeless right if

I'm going to be in a situation where I can just start to use my language with a French speaker such as yourself I need to know that you're going to support me a a and you know put up with my mistakes and just assist me and guide me and you give me gu a little bit of guidance and help me where the mistakes are causing a communication breakdown but I you know I need to be in a place in a situation where I'm feeling safe to be able to take that risk once I'm safe the

emotional effective anxiety boundary uh barriers start to come down and once they're down I can really start using my linguistic resources more effectively I've got a bit more space in my head in my mind to pay attention to the mistakes because I'm not so worried about being an idiot so yeah yeah definitely I've definitely noticed that for successful language Learners one of the the things that I've observed is that these people are not necessarily very afraid of making mistakes and uh they just you know talk and write and try to communicate and then at some

point things just work you mentioned that for the accuracy part you can use you know textbooks and stuff like that this is something I want to talk about because to me at least from you know I'm not an academic but I'm seeing this from The Average Joe's perspective it seems to me like in Academia in the field of let's say just you know second language acquisition vocabulary and all this language learning related fields there are two types of opinions so I'm talking specifically about I tried to get Stephen crashion on to to an interview and

I'm sure you're aware of his opinions on you know it's all about input and essentially Nothing Else Matters or it's really just a low return on on on your time I had Bill Van Patton sort of the same opinion I'm going to interview um Jeff mcquillin next month and so there's the it's all about input uh people and then there are there are people who are you know like yourself like Paul Nation where it's like you know input is great but then at the same time there are lots of deliberate learning activities that you can

do that are proven to work so I'm really confused because you know people on both sides seem like you know very well um educated in in the field so why do you think there is this divide here oh well yeah the field has been wrestling with that question for 85 crash and rot as input hypothesis I think so what is that 40 years ago 40 years we've been struggling with this question I think um crash's claims for the sufficiency of input are are problematic but you know no theory of second language acquisition doesn't Avail itself

of input as a powerful explanatory Factor input is is necessary without a question whether it's sufficient which is I think I don't want to put words in crash's mouth but I think he would argue for the sufficiency of input and others have a more nuanced perhaps perspective on that arguing that it's input plus opportunities to notice the grammar and and um pay deliberate attention to the grammar which poor Nation would argue for in relation to his four strands principle from my perspective as a proponent of task-based language teaching I support the idea of getting Learners

to put language to use whether it's listening or speaking or interacting whatever and building attention to grammar and vocabulary and forms of the language into that process of doing a task of some it reminds me of something that lightbound and spider I don't know if you come across lightbound and spider two very famous um Canadian scholars in the field whose book I think it's called how languages are learned one of the classic undergradu texts in SLA and they talk about the two options of for language teaching or learning of get it right in the beginning

option one or get it right at the end option two option one get it right at the beginning is reflected in approaches like AUD lingualism grammar translation where the focus is on making sure everything the learner everything the Learners produce in the language is accurate from the beginning train them in in understanding the rules and the grammar rehearse it drill it so that they you've eliminated the risk of mistakes with the assumption that they will then go on to use the language accurately from then on but all the research so shows that that's a fairly

dismal failure and all that does is produce Learners who who who have a vast knowledge of the language but an inability to put that that knowledge to to use not least because I guess they're so anxious about making mistakes because they've been you know they've drilled into not making mistakes and getting it right so I think the the approach that I support I think that is reflected in tblt to some extent reflected in crash's ideas I think probably reflected in Bill van Patton's ideas is that you provide opportunities to to pay attention to linguistic features

before during and after the meaningful activities that you engage Learners in now in Bill van Patton's input processing approach right you know the learners do have some strategy I think that's referred to as where they strategy strategy training to begin with where they given some cues about okay you're going to listen to a passage you know here's here's what you here's the particular linguistic feature you need to watch out for now we're going to listen to it and you're going to extract the meaning from the passage but in order to extract meaning to do an

activity in which you're making sense of it you have to listen for those particular features right right but you're tuned into the particular learnable features in the the input but primarily it's for the purpose of making sense of the input so it's still being driven largely by a meaning message extraction process and then can be followed up by a bit further diagnostic reflection on well what did I get right what did I get wrong what have I learned what's the rule so you're kind of doing some conscious reflection at the heart of that learning process

is using language meaningfully and even you know from crash's perspective just lots of compreh input but it's comprehensible input with additional opportunities to learn yes I think of this a Peter ski and a wonderful um very influential British applied linguist talks about the the idea of nurturing noticing nurturing noticing and I like that phrase I think he WR I think he he has an article which that is the title and what he means by that is that we need to give our Learners lots of opportunities to listen or if you're sorry I'm thinking from a

teacher's perspective but if you're just you know learning yourself from input or from whatever it might be watching movies listening to text reading simple novels in the language or whatever that's great but he argues that there needs to the opportunities to nurture the process of noticing learnable features so you're thinking beforeand about what features do I expect to find in this text what do I notice for example about how tenses are marked or the structure of adverbial Clauses in the language so you kind of just you know you're reading for meaning or you're listening for

meaning but you're also just you got your antenna turned on to notice things about it and at the end of the process then you do some perhaps some deliberate conscious reflection on some of the features that you learned I mean I think of I'm just reminded in saying this of du lingo that I think in that program they they encourage you that if you've done a lesson or two don't just turn off the tape and go away and forget about it but after that spend a bit of time maybe make a few notes where you

just recall what is it what have I learned in this lesson so you're adding value to the process of engaging with right yeah this is very interesting because I never really thought about it this way so it's augmented input let's say and so when you say noticing and it's funny because I had an other interview with um a girl who's pretty successful a Russian speaker who learned English and we just so we just happen to talk about noticing without knowing that necessarily it's a a whole Topic in in the research So when you say noticing

features of the language so we're talking about for example certain grammatical features but also vocabulary right the way that words are used and so on right okay I wanted to ask this qu I also asked this question with Paul Nation but I he admitted that he was it's probably a little bit biased because he his area of expertise is vocabulary but my experience has been learning English now learning Japanese I'm learning a little bit of Italian so it's on the back burner but the main obstacle for me has always been vocabulary you know the gramar

the the pronunciation listening this is somewhat manageable uh in you know manage these things but vocabulary it just seems like there are thousands tens of thousands of words that I need to master to really be proficient in the language would you agree with with this that vocabulary is really the the main obstacle for language Learners yes I think there's been far too much of an emphasis on grammar traditionally and vocabulary has very often taken second fiddle and yet as youve pointed out actually it's what's the first violin and you know it's actually first violin in

the orch you know vocabulary drives our language proficiency forwards to say something else about that the thought has slipped my mind carry on is there something else you want to yeah so given that vo vocabulary is the main obstacle then it would make sense to spend more time thinking about how to acquire vocabulary a lot faster and a lot better we talked about flash cards with pollination which apparently there there's a lot of uh research on are there activities that you would recommend for people in the classroom and outside of the classroom for vocabulary yes

let me just go back to the thought that I had before that I was holding in the back of my mind that I didn't quite finish so I'll come back to that question I want to go back to nurturing noticing just for a minute because I feel like I didn't quite wrap that up and I want to just kind of draw together a link between the study a learner might do of the language of linguistic forms of vocabulary for example or grammar so they might study and then they might struggle with understanding why why can

I not immediately use what I've studied and I think the reason is that our our study of language our explicit deliberate study of rules and structures and new words is valuable but it often has an indirect root to learning and what I mean by that is particularly with grammar we might study the grammar but in order for that study to be integrated into our productive language system we have to see that particular feature many times in input we have to be processing it so that our our language processor and this is I'm I'm sure crashion

would be happy with this a linguistic processor has to be just processing that particular feature lots of times so it starts to get integrated into our usable implicit knowledge of the language and so I think the if Learners are wondering what is the role of explicit study of language I think the role is that it helps you notice the features in the input right so when you're when you're reading and listening the explicit study gives you a kind of a handle on some of those linguistic structures you're meeting while you're reading for meaning or listening

for meaning so that's just a I wanted just to wrap that thought up and I think that again is where I would part company with crashion because I'm arguing there for a really valuable role for explicit learning alongside implicit learning now that's true for grammar but now we come to vocabulary and it's a slightly different case because vocabulary doesn't function cognitively like grammar know grammar is a generative system where you've got the sort of abstract rule but whereas vocabulary is I mean I don't want to oversimplify it but it's more of a onetoone correspondence here's

a word here's what it means but of course it's much more than that because words mean different things and they use in different contexts and in different ways but now coming back to your question how can let me just try and rephrase your question and you can um then shoot it back to me if I've got it wrong you're asking me how can Learners rapidly build their vocabulary given how important it is and given how much there is to look yes for this I think you can turn to pretty much anything that poor nation's written

and find the answers and you there lots of his material online but Paul argues that you know start with The High Frequency vocabulary so start with the words that you're going to see a lot learn them quickly and directly and deliberately using flash cards or lists make sure that you at the same time are doing a lot of reading and listening of material that is simple so that you see those words in real text and I think the important point there is simple many Learners that I work with I'm amazed at the fact that they

engaging they're watching movies or TV shows or reading books that are written for advanced speakers or native speakers and struggling and the problem with that is that they simply aren't engaging in the authentic process of reading or listening for meaning because every F every fifth word is a word they have to stop and think about or look up or they're got to go back and think about the grammar and that's not really you know I mean that's valuable in its own right but that's not going to give you the EXT s of input that you

need you know I think I think Paul's probably done some calculations around this but if you think of the num the number of words you can process in in 10 minutes of reading and then you multiply that by 365 days of a year say you read for 10 minutes in the language every day I'm not sure how many words you can read in 10 minutes in a second language if it's a difficult piece of text you won't be reading very many and you won't be understanding very much but if you can find graded readers or

simple reading material that is at a level where you can read a whole page and maybe only come across three words that you don't so you need to be able to read that kind of material every day for a short period of time and then just think in your head how many words is my brain actually processing and it'll turn out to be tens of thousands in a relative if we if we think of a page containing I mean let's say 300 words and let's say you can read 10 pages I mean if you're if

you know of a simple simplified book in in 10 minutes I mean maybe that's maybe we need 15 minutes but let's say it's 10 pages that's 3,000 words a day 3,000 words a daytimes 365 I'm not going to do the multiplication online but that's an awful lot of linguistic processing from from a usage based perspective on second language acquisition now which is I think a well regarded theoretical perspective on how we acquire language through through massive usage through massive exposure to massive amounts of input and use I think that is achieving really important goal or

it's providing a very important mechanism for us to achieve the goal requiring fluency in the language I'm going to go online I'm going to find the simple material I'm going to get the word lists I'm going to make sure I know the first 3,000 4 3,000 words of English or French or whatever it is first and then on that basis think um when you come across the other words increasingly you will have enough context around them around those words to make sense of them more easily now it's not always that simple but when you know

the first 3 4,000 words of a of a language you know you know 85% of the words you're going to meet on a on a random page of text and that other 15% is made up of the other 90,000 words in the language when which you haven't got a hope in Hell of learning yeah it's uh that's been my experience as well you know learning English seems it's it's so strange because the beginning is it's a very slow start you just learn the language and the most important words you start to learn them it's a

very slow process but the more you learn the faster you can know make connections with other words and and stuff like that and so it seems almost exponential the the growth uh this is something I've definitely been uh thinking about lately because I do make uh flash card decks and so they contain the 10,000 most common words in multiple languages but I I wanted to get your opinion on obviously this is somewhat of a trendy topic but artificial intelligence probably up to 6 months ago I didn't really pay attention to all the the hype around

artificial intelligence but then I started using chat GPT and specifically obviously you know writing and they have this new model where you can talk to the app and it actually talks back with stuff that is very relevant and on point although I have noticed because I'm using it for Japanese where I talk in Japanese with Chad GPT and it talks back in perfect Japanese except that it has a slight English accent which is uh a little bit strange but do you see this having any future in in the classroom for language learner I think it

has an application everywhere so I've used Gemini in fact in my case to generate simple conversations in French I just say look give me a a 200w conversation in simple French about the weather okay about a couple of people in Paris talking about the weather all right so and please you know use the most frequent you know low frequenc or high frequency words in Fr so it's an easy you know and then I can I can read it I can listen Len to it yeah just play around with it look at the linguistic features of

it so yeah so that's a very simple way of using jet GPT and that's kind of non-interactive but you're right you can also actually use it as a conversational partner so you can use you know a chat box um to to do all sorts of interactive things and I think that's going to be just increasing in potentiality just month by month in the future so implications for the classroom just about every conference I go to AI is is a theme and they're asking this question and you're right you know 6 months ago people were talking

about it in or maybe a year ago talking about it in the future and now we're right in the middle of it and we're looking at what it can offer what it's already offering and what it's likely to offer two three months 6 months 2 years perhaps it's wishful thinking but most of the people that I've talked to in this area are hopeful that teachers will still have a role in if you like humanizing language learning and they will have a role because classrooms will still have a role that we will still want to get

together with other people and engage face to face whether it's face to face virtually or better face to face physically what roles almost any aspect of language teaching you can think about AI has a role generating generating input generating flashcards generating opportunities to speak giving you feedback on your speaking as a teacher designing lessons so ask check GPT you know I've got a lesson today with a beginner class of English language Learners and I would like you to design a lesson on family life I'd like the lesson to last for about 50 minutes I'd like

it to have a simple reading and listening text some pictures and some pairwork activities and you know you you can you have to learn to give as you know AI the right kind of prompts yeah it'll give you the lesson print it off or drop it drop it into your um Powerpoints and where you go yeah I suppose my concern I'm just going I'm just just let me interrupt I'm just going to sit down here so if you see weird things happening I'm just going to oh yeah sure oh myself I've got a stand up

desk which is okay nice I've been mean to I want to get one of these but yeah with the computer it's it's a little bit uh complicated hey guys just a 30 second uh break here from the interview then we'll go back to the interview I just want to make a deal with you if you're enjoying this episode if you're enjoying all my interviews I want to make a deal with you I'm going to continue to put much more effort even more effort into booking the best guests uh that I can and you know getting

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get other guests back to the interiew but what was I about to say oh yes for now what I've noticed with a I with uh chat BT at least is that it's quite good at giving me input and you know having conversations but I you know the AI give me feedback on what I say and if I make any mistakes then point them out and tell me what the the the right way of saying it is but I always found that the feedback is always somewhat minimal and very conservative it's never it's never saying well

this is wrong you should say it this way so which leads me to think that well maybe this is going to get better in the future but what is to you the importance of getting feedback specifically from a tutor from from a teacher is this a really important aspect of of learning yeah I think it's uh it's a really important aspect of learning if you adopt the approach that I referred to before which is get it right in the end so get it right in the beginning in that approach feedback is less important because you're

focusing on accuracy at at the beginning so you're drilling the the forms but if you adopt get it right at the end approach which is having conversations and stumbling through them and trying to construct the language as best you can then it's feedback becomes a really crucial mechanism for for refining and building your resources you know I'm trying to say this and I've haven't quite said it right so you get some feedback which offers you the you know some the word that you're looking for you can drop that in or it corrects the grammar you

can just quickly put that new grammar into the sentence and try it again this is very much part of an approach of get it right in the end in other words learn through using the language rather than learn the language and later on use the language with the assumption that your learning will automatically flow into your use and and we know that it doesn't and G coming back to crash is kind of an Insight that he had here he argued that all of that explicit learning feeds into what he refers to as the monitor but

it doesn't feed into your acquired implicit language resources which you use which we all use in our first language to effort effortlessly communicate and and construct meaning I don't know where that sentence started I think I kind of lost my way there yeah we were talking about yeah the importance of feedback from teachers yeah yeah yeah yeah so feedback but of course it has to be applied sensitively and appropriately you know the research on feedback suggests that you know it it has to be somewhat intensive around certain features so it's not like a shotgun where

you just you know where the teacher attacks every single error but they select certain kinds of erors and and are consistent with the feedback on those errors so that Learners Learners attentional resources are not stretched too thin so okay there's a couple of features here the teacher is going to give feedback on I'm going to get that sort of Fairly consistent feedback on those features to help me of shape that part of my proficiency shape it up right and then it's time to move on to something else but another point I'd make about feedback is

that and many teachers will have this experience that they relentlessly give feedback and it seems to make little difference so there's that issue there you and Learners will have the same problem as look I you know you give me feedback on this and it doesn't make a difference and you know there are various theories that explain this I Pan's processibility Theory says that there's not much Point giving feedback on linguistic structures that are in advance too far in advance of the cognitive processes that the learner is able to engage in at a certain point in

their learning so classic one is third person plural s now that's a very simple you know marking third person plural right on on verbs and yet it is one that takes Learners a long time to acquire and they can be quite Advanced and still making mistakes in third person plural s and peterman's argument is that actually it's a developmental feature which comes relatively late in a fairly fixed sequence of forms that we acquire in a language it's a predictable sequence of forms and that one comes kind of late so if you give Learners feedback on

third person plural essent and they're just beginning Learners they're not ready to incorporate that structure into their inter language so the feedback might help help them with their conscious knowledge about the language okay so I know about this feature I know about it soon as they're put under communicative pressure it goes it's not there because they are not ready to acquire it they haven't got the the cognitive processes the cognitive linguistic processes in place for that feature to be embedded into there yeah so feedback you know feedback has to be sensitive sensitive to those kind

of constraints yeah I was about to ask actually um this is really interesting because I talk pretty much every day with Japanese speakers and of course I have to you know point out some of the mistakes that they that they make not all of them but I've always been wondering well you know which ones should I really point out but there's no Universal answer I suppose it depends on their stage of development of the language then it's really hard to know what that stage is you know this is not something that you can identify in

black and white terms but you probably develop fairly good intuitions about which which features are are worth paying attention to and which features are worth giving feedback on or getting feedback on and which features can be left and another part of this of course is that some features actually it doesn't matter too much for spoken language at least so what really matter that is for spoken language you know and this you're in a high stakes context where accuracy is really really important but if your use of englishes if your use of conversational English is fairly

casual even in a work context you don't have to be absolutely precise then don't worry about giving feedback on third person pluralist it doesn't matter I can still understand you whether you use it or not if you're you know and if the learner has got to a point where actually they they're quite proficient and they really uh they have if you like this particular form has you know coming back to this word stabilized or in older terms fossilized I really don't like that term then the learner may say you know I I really it's really

time for me in my professional work using English in my job as a lawyer say or a doctor I really want to start working on some of the fine-tuning some of these parts of my English fine in which case intensive feedback on that you know might be one part of The Suite of of ways that a learner is going to or a user of the language is going to really work on refining that feature but otherwise give feedback on the features that really matter for comprehensibility intelligibility and pragmatic pragmatic appropriateness right in fact um I

think there's research that shows that errors in appropriateness pragmatics are judged by native speakers as more serious than errors in pronunciation oh okay right yeah um I remember watching a clip on YouTube with it was an interview of Stephen crash where he was talking in part about feedback and his opinion was that you know it's it's just uh feedback is just useless and all that but at the same time I I remember listening to this and thinking well some of it is not you know you're not going to remember it as a learner but at

the same time my experience has been that I've received feedback even now even recently where I apply this when I speak and you know when I write in English and this this has definitely been effective so it's not always yeah maybe I'm not always ready to incorporate it but i' I've seen the results yeah I mean that really strong anecdotal evidence but we also have to look to research and I think you know with these questions we have to be we have to be looking at the research evidence and saying what is their evidence what

claims does evidence support and what claims are not supported by evidence well crash's Claim about feedback is not supported by evidence there's very substantial there's a substantial body of research now 30 I suppose it's a good 30 years of you know research on corrective feedback it really became popular in the 90s in particular research looking at the value of corrective feedback and Roy L's working lists work in in Canada among many others you know it's shown that without doubt that appropriate feedback leads to acquisition now what appropriate means is what forms do you give feedback

on when do you give it how do you give it who gives it what kind of response is expected all of these complicated factors feed into whether the feedback is is going to work or not so it is complicated and there's probably a lot of cases where it doesn't work but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that feedback has a really important valuable role in pushing language development forward great actually I do have a last question and still very much on the topic of research because it seems to me that you know I've I've actually

done some teaching in the past not well I've done some language teaching actually uh but it was young kids so it doesn't really count I mean listeners may not necessarily be able to relate but it seems to me talking with teachers and I have some family members that are teachers as well language teachers that there's this whole world of you know your research Paul nation's research a lot of research in uh language teaching and language learning but teachers are not aware of it and it's not just that they're not aware of it when I talk

about it with them I tell them well look I have a YouTube channel and there's all this great information I'm really surprised that no one knows about this they're like oh yeah okay and they're they're not really interested in in the research and they just keep doing things the way that they've always been done in schools and so why do you think there is such a gap between the research and you know that well that's a tough question I think because the research has not been packaged for teachers often so it's you know people write

up research so that other researchers can read it and they might be researching language classrooms and they might be researching language teaching and language learning but they write about it for other researchers and so the dialogue is is functioning outside of what makes sense for teachers that's I think that's one of the reasons I think also teachers are are busy often overworked underpaid and you know what are they expected to do go away and read research it's a that's a big ask but that said when I travel around and I speak to a lot of

teachers around Asia you know I find teachers really hungry to do things better to learn about what to do they haven't got much time though so you know they they they need help they want that they're willing to get help but they need that help to be realistic and practically applicable to their context so when I'll give you an example of one of my PhD students Jing Yuan from China did a wonderful PhD which she completed last year in fact it's just been published as a book and I probably should find the name of the

book for you but I haven't got it with me she wanted to know about whether task-based language teaching would work in a rural School in a poor part of mainland China so she went up to the school and this is you know we're talking about the poorest Province in China she went to a school and worked with teachers here and she found that the teachers were kind of struggling to teach effectively uh teaching in very traditional ways she said they were teaching in the ways and you know Jing is probably a little bit younger than

me but you know she probably went to school 30 or 40 years ago and she said that actually they're teaching in the same way that my teachers taught me so not much had changed now she she spent you know few months or weeks I think it was a CP of months in that school working alongside the teachers talking to them about their teaching redesigning lesson plans and co- teing with them and she her thesis tells a wonderful story of how the teachers were so receptive to new ideas and to doing things different and when they

learned the new ideas they flourished and the classes went fabulously in the same with another one of my PhD students looking at teaching in in a university in Vietnam the same thing that when she observed the teachers teaching from the textbook the teachers would focus on all the grammar activities and whenever there was an interactive activity they would ignore it or just translate it or just you know avoid that and when she talked to them they and asked them why they did it they said well I don't know what's the purpose what's the why should

I get Learners to talk to each other they didn't really understand the value of it when they were when she workshopped task based language teaching explained the value of interaction how interaction leads to learning and how you can do these activities and then she co-planned some lessons and observed them teaching and she saw again you know a transformation in the quality of Engagement and the quality of teaching in those classes and the difference was the teachers as you say they weren't aware of the options that were available to them or they weren't aware of the

theoretical or the principles behind things like interactive AC activities and the principles of why you do them but also the principles how to of how to organize a group work so I think there's a gap there in teacher education those two studies show that when teachers are made aware even if they're underpaid and overworked you know that teachers that professionals they want to do a good job and certainly that those are two studies that show teachers a teaching practice was transformed through awareness raising and knowledge building great and I hope that know my my uh

YouTube channel can can help with this a little bit you know package this uh for example this interview would be great for someone getting to teaching definitely so I hope I can help to bridge the gap a little bit Yeah well if anybody wants to contact me about anything I've mentioned here any of the studies or comments I've made you know they're very welcome yeah thank you so much Jonathan I want to be respectful of your time so this has been really great I'm sure people have learned a lot and uh thank you so much

pleasure thank you