Fundamentals of Second Language Acquisition: A Crash Course (READ NOTES)

Welcome everyone and thank you for coming tonight! I know it's nighttime and you would probably rather be doing something else, so I appreciate your your attention tonight. My name again is is Jeff McQuillin, and I'm coming to you from Los Angeles, as Amir mentioned. I've been teaching in second language situations for 30 - 40 years - most of my career. Even though I'm only 29, I've been teaching for 30 years, so you you can figure that out. Tonight we're going to talk about some of what I call the "Fundamentals of Language Acquisition." So these are

the basic principles, at least from one perspective, of how we get new - how we pick up new languages, and as a beginning teacher especially, it's really important for you to understand what are the some of the we could call them "theoretical principles" behind language acquisition. A lot of beginning teachers, they just want to know HOW you do it. "What do I do in the classroom? What do I do next? What activity should I use?" These are really good questions, right? And Amir and the other wonderful teachers you have there will help you with those

things, and have helped you with those things, I'm sure. But in order to understand if something is working or not, you have to understand the basic theory of how we pick up languages. Because if you have the wrong idea, you might think something is working but if you don't really understand what the the the results should be, how things should actually look like, you won't be able to understand whether you're doing the right thing in the classroom. So although it's easy to think that at the beginning there's no connection - there's "theory" here and there's

"practice" here and there's no connection. In fact, those two things are very closely connected. Understanding the WHY helps you understand the HOW, okay? So if you know why we're doing things then you can figure out by yourself, or by looking at other teachers, or by reading, how you actually do the things that you need to do to help your students be successful in your classroom. All right, I'm going to talk about five different fundamental or basic ideas - or we could call these "hypotheses," because in science, we use the word "hypothesis" to mean "It's our

best guess," right? You probably know that in science, we don't ever - we're never absolutely 100% certain about most things. What we do is we have a hypothesis, we have a guess, and then we see whether that guess is correct. And that's what scientists do: They they have ideas and then they find evidence to support these ideas, or they find evidence that this idea is a bad idea, and they throw that out and they come up with a new guess, a new hypothesis. Well, we're going to talk about five hypotheses, five of our - we

could call these our "best guesses" about how language acquisition works. And these five ideas come from a scholar, a professor here in Los Angeles, actually, in California, by the name of Stephen Krashen, and I was Stephen Krashen's student many years ago. So just like you are a student of Amir and your teachers there, I was a student of Dr. Stephen Krashen. And so I'm going to talk about some of his ideas to give you at least one way of thinking about how you can help your students - the "why" of language acquisition, okay? So let's

start with our first big idea. And the first big idea is the difference between ACQUISITION and LEARNING. Now, these are terms that are - we could call them "technical terms" in English, because we're going to use them in a very specific way. When I talk about - when people talk about language "learning," they they mean a lot of different things. But I'm going to give these two words, ACQUISITION and LEARNING, some very specific, we could call them technical definitions. When I say "learning," I mean conscious knowledge of language. You see, your brain has two different

ways of storing language information. Inside of your brain is a part of your brain that is we say "dedicated" or is made for acquiring or picking up languages. So knowledge is stored in your brain in two different ways: one way is what we call LEARNING, and learning is conscious knowledge. So conscious knowledge is knowledge that you can write down. These are the rules that you study in grammar - for example, in English, the plural is usually formed by adding an -s (sound) at the end of a word. So I have one cup and I have

one glass and I have two drinking vesselS, two things I can drink from, the two vessels has an -S at the end. I have one pen, two penS. I have two penS, right? okay? This is easy, right? You all know that, this is very easy, basic English. But that knowledge - that you form a plural, that you create the plural with an -S - is conscious knowledge. You can study it. You can write down. it's something that usually you study in a language class when you're studying rules of grammar, for example, or rules of punctuation,

okay? So language has lots of rules, and you can study some of these rules consciously. But there's another kind of knowledge that your brain holds there's conscious knowledge but there's also unconscious knowledge unconscious knowledge is not knowledge that it's in your brain but you don't necessarily know it's there and you don't necessarily understand why you understand it for example um if you're a a little baby when little babies are born right their mother speaks to them and their father speaks to them and the baby eventually starts acquiring language the baby is not getting conscious knowledge

the mother is not saying okay uh uh Amir s is the way that we add to what we add to the end of the word to form a plural no no no no right you don't teach rules to a little baby you just talk to the baby okay and the baby acquires language unconsciously the baby doesn't study you don't give a baby a grammar book and say study these rules and I'll test you tomorrow no right all of us when we were born with our mothers and fathers we acquired language unconsciously in fact you have

so much language that you don't even know the rules that you know right if I asked you if I if you go and ask somebody well why in English do we use this rule versus that rule most people don't know but but they can understand it and they can speak it they can write it they can use it 100% correctly without knowing any of the rules okay so two ways of knowing language learning conscious it's something that you can study something you can write down usually you do this when you get to school so when

you went to school when you were a younger child when you were I don't know when you start school five six seven years old the teacher started maybe taught you some rules of Persian rules uh of your language right but you already knew a lot of Persian before you got to school right those that kind of knowledge that you knew before you got to school is what we call acquisition it's unconscious knowledge so there are these two separate ways of knowing language unconscious and conscious acquisition I and learning okay we all agree that you have

these two kinds of knowledge you can have knowledge of language both acquisition and learning so for example I know how to use the third person singular verb in English once again just like the plural to form the third person singular he goes he runs he walks what do you do you add a S at the end okay that's the rule I know that rule consciously because I was an English teacher okay and I would teach that rule to my students I also know that rule unconsciously I can have the same rule in both language systems

okay and that's really important why because some people like little babies grow growing up or people who have never gone to school all of their language knowledge is acquisition it's all acquired they may go to school later and learn the some of the rules that they already Acquired and then they could have both language and uh learning and acquisition but you can have all acquisition you can also have mostly or all learning you can study the rules of a language but then when you try to speak it nothing comes out or you try to understand

it you can't understand it acquisition is the one that we use without thinking about it okay now which of these two is most is more important acquisition or learning I think you probably know already just because the way I've been describing it that acquisition is the most important knowledge you can have the unconscious knowledge and the reason is is that most of the language that we use 95% of the time right now when you're listening to me talk or when you read the article you're using 99% of the time your acquisition your unconscious knowledge how

do I know that well because as you're listening to me you're not stopping and thinking oh he said a past tense verb there yeah that's right it was past tense no you just understand what I'm saying without having to think about it that's using your acquisition so 95% or 99% of the time when you're speaking and when you're listening when you're writing and when you're reading you're using your acquisition so acquisition is the most important kind of language we can have now here's the here's the bad news the bad news is you can't study for

acquisition you can study for learning right tomorrow I could give you a test on the third person singular s and the plural s in English and you can go home or you can go into your bedroom and you can study the rule and tomorrow I can give you a test and you can get 100% on it that's learning that's conscious knowledge but acquisition is not something that you can study for consciously it's something that we get in a completely different way how do we get acquisition well wait I'm going to talk about that in a

few minutes it it'll be a it'll be our little secret for a couple of more minutes but right now all you I want you to understand is that there are these two different kinds of learning of of Knowledge Learning and acquisition and that acquisition is the most important kind of knowledge that we can give our students now the question is how we give them that knowledge and I'm going to tell you that in a few minutes okay a couple more things before we leave acquisition and learning um learning does not become automatically acquisition and acquisition

does not automat aut atically become learning in other words just because you know the rule for say third person singular s he goes she walks he runs and so forth right you know that rule you can know that rule but you won't necessarily acquire that rule automatically in fact there are people who speak English as a second language and have lived in England or the United States or Australia for 20 30 40 years and still after 30 years when they speak using their acquisition using their unconscious knowledge they make a mistake on the third person

singular us how is that possible they know the rule if you ask them what's the rule for the third person singular s they know it they know the add an S but when they actually speak or perhaps when they're writing an email they get it wrong now why do they get it wrong I'm going to tell you that in in in in our next big idea okay but for now understand that just because you study over and over and over and over again does not mean it's going to become acquisition why because these are two

separate systems in your brain these are two different ways of of knowledge and just because you have one doesn't mean you have the other okay so learning does not become acquisition let's move on to the next big idea and the next this is number two the next big idea is something called the natural order hypothesis now we just talked about the third person singular s right he runs she runs and I said that you can know that rule consciously but you may not acquire it now why do some people never acquire that rule well this

second big idea the natural order hypothesis explains why we acquire some things unconsciously and not others here's the idea for reasons that we don't understand okay and that's really important to understand there are a lot of things about language acquisition that we don't understand that linguists like myself or linguists that uh are studying in Harvard and and the universities in tran and in Oxford and in Cambridge there there are things they don't understand about language still and this is one of the things that we still don't understand why but we know it's true we know

that it's probably true okay it's hypothesis so when I say it's true I mean it's probably true we have evidence that shows that we think it's correct the natural order hypothesis says that in every language there are certain grammatical structures that you pick up quickly right away or within the first say month or two and there are other grammatical structures that we pick up after a long long long long time and there's what we call a natural order some of these are really easy and some of them are what we say are late acquired now

let me clarify let me say we're talking now about acquisition we're not talking about learning you can learn the rules of English in any order you want you could start with the past tense rules you could start with the present tense rules you could start with the uh uh uh you know the plural you could start with how we form contractions okay you can study those rules in any order but you acquire those rules unconsciously in a certain fixed order and there's nothing you can do to change that order now every language is different English

has a natural order of acquisition Spanish has a natural order of acquisition Persian farsy has a natural order of acquisition we don't actually know the exact order but we know that there are some things that are quickly acquired by your brain and some things that take a long time we don't know why I'm sorry I wish we knew why but we don't know why it's not because one rule is simple because what could be simpler than the rule for the third person singular s in English it's a very simple rule you can teach your students

that rule on the first day of class but they may learn the rule but they won't acquire that rule it will take them a long time to acquire that rule why we don't know now this is actually good news because there are some people when they are uh acquiring a new language they get frustrated I know that rule but then when I tried to use it I got it wrong why your brain the language acquisition part of your brain we sometimes call it the language acquisition device it's it's built a certain way okay there's nothing

you can do about it there are some things that are going to come quickly and some things that going to come late in English for example the plural s comes fairly quickly so does the ing form so I am walking w a l k i n G that ing the use of What's called the present progressive that is acquired fairly quickly by by uh acquirers the third person singular s could take forever you could never get it okay some people never get it they never acquire it unconsciously so we don't know the reason why but

some things seem the brain seems to pick up very quickly and some things the brain takes a long time to pick up so don't worry if you if you there are things that you still don't aren't able to use automatically in English that's okay that's not because you're doing something wrong and it's not something you can go home and study for you can't memorize those rules it won't make any difference it just takes a while for things to be acquired we don't know why it happens but we do know that it happens and it happens

basically for the same order for everybody who acquires English now again the orders are different in different languages right so farsy has a different order I have no idea what it is but it has an order but it's different from English okay the most important thing you understand is that this order exists okay that it's there and that we know that it's there and that some things are easy and some things are late English because it's so popular around the world is probably the most studied language of any language currently spoken right because because there

are millions of people who who are interested in English and so lots of professors lots of Scholars lots of researchers have studied English but even they don't know why some things are acquired early and some things are acquired late so don't worry about it you're not going to figure it out either but that's okay all right so that's our second big idea remember this big idea about what's called the natural order is only for acquisition we're talking about unconscious knowledge I want to stress that not conscious knowledge you can study rules in any order and

you can get 100% on the test but acquisition is different when you're actually speaking and listening and writing and reading using your language automatically let's say that's when you're using your unconscious acquisition and that order is determined by your brain not by your study schedule okay all right big idea number three how is learning related to the way way that we use language we've just talked about the natural order of acquisition now we're going to talk about the third big idea which is sometimes called the monitor hypothesis I don't know if you know that word

in English monitor Mo n t o r to monitor means to um to watch to look at something and maybe to make changes uh to depending on what is happening so we have an expression in English monitor the situation to monitor the situation means to to look at it see if it's going right if it's not going right you go in and you fix it in your classroom when you when you begin teaching if you haven't begun teaching yet if you when you get in front of your students you have all these lovely students standing

in front of you right and you're starting to teach your class and you notice that there are a couple of students in the back of the class who are talking oh that's bad right you as the teacher you're monitoring the classroom you're looking at the classroom and if you see somebody talking and you're talking at the same time and you want them to listen you stop and you go excuse me could you listen I'm saying something now you can talk later okay that's my monitoring your classroom you're you're looking at your classroom and you're figuring

out what's going on and you're correcting or making changes based on what you see okay that's the verb to monitor okay now the third big idea is called the monitor hypothesis and here's what it does you've got this conscious knowledge in your brain right it's it's called learning and you can you study the rules you know the rules and so forth how do you use that learning and when you actually go about speaking listening reading and writing well the monitor hypothesis answers that question for us and I'm going to use a little visual here very

low Tech okay okay so uh can everybody see that this is your brain right this is your brain right here now language can go into your brain in only two ways right how do you get language into your brain you listen or you read you either hear it or you see it so your eyes and your ears are how you get language into your brain how do you get language out of your brain you talk your mouth or you write your hands okay so your mouth and your hands are the way you get language out

of your uh a brain we can call these we can give these names language that go goes into your brain is called input and language that goes out of your brain is called output okay so listening and reading are input speaking and writing our output now this brain here this is your acquisition this is your unconscious knowledge but I said we have two different kinds of knowledge right we also have what's called learning well learning is a different part of your brain I know this is very messy I apologize so this little black dot here

that's that's learning that's the conscious knowledge you have in your your brain those are the rules that you know so here's what happens how do you use that learning to help improve your language skills can you use it and the answer is yes even though 99% of the time we're using our acquisition when we're speaking and when we're writing you can also use your learning sometimes to fix your language to make it a little better to monitor your language you can go in and you can fix mistakes that you haven't acquired yet things that you

haven't acquired yet so like the third person singular s he goes she goes He Walks she walks what happens is sometimes your brain will come up with the idea and your brain will produce your acquisition it will you'll say he walk but before it gets out of your mouth before you write it down you stop and you go wait a minute that's wrong WR it should be walks not walk and so you use your learning and your learning comes in and it it fixes your output it it corrects your mistake before you say it or

before you write it now this is possible and we it is possible to use your learning to make your language better we would say it's possible to monitor your output in order to fix it and make it better that's good news right that means that you can actually study certain rules and you can use them to make your language better however there's a we there's a big we would say in English there's a big butt here but the the times that you can actually use that are very Li limited there's only a small number of

cases where you can actually use your learning why because in order to use your conscious knowledge your learned rules there are three things that you need to have there are three we would say conditions for monitor use three things that must be there in order to use the rule and all three have to be present all three have to be there the first thing obviously is you have to know the rule right you actually have to know the rule if you don't know the rule well you can't you can't use it now this seems like

you might think well that's easy I'll just study all the rules of English I'll go home tonight and I get my grammar book and I'm going to study all the rules of English you think you can do that no why well first of all there are lots and lots of rules in that grammar book there are lots and lots of rules to memorize I don't know all the rules in the grammar book even Amir the great Amir doesn't know all the rules in the grammar book okay and he's a smart guy I know he doesn't

know all the brutes in the grammar book your wonderful teacher here doesn't know all the rules in the grammar book nobody knows all the rules in the grammar book it's impossible to know all the the rules okay you can know a lot of rules but you're never going to know all the rules in fact nobody knows all the rules because some of the rules we don't even know there are rules of English right now that we don't understand that no one has discovered it's like a planet that nobody's seen before there are things about English

and about farsy and about Spanish and about Chinese and about Arabic that nobody knows we don't understand 100% of the language so you can't possibly know all of the rules but you can know some of the rules okay you can know some of them you just can't know all of them in fact for most people you can only know a small percentage of them but let's say you know the rule is that enough no that's not enough you have to know the rule but also you have to have time to use the rule let's say

say I'm having a conversation let's say air and I are talking and um he says something and then I say something and then he says something and I'm G to answer him and let's say I'm uh I'm speaking English and I'm a little confused and I say um I now the verb should be go it's the verb to go I let's see to go first person singular is no okay I go he let's say first person singular would be um or third person singular would be S so he goes you think we're going to be

able to have a conversation if you're stopping and thinking about the rule that requires time you need time to use your monitor you need time to use your your written words which is why if you're having a conversation with someone one you can't stop every 10 seconds and think about wait a minute let me that's not possible right the only time that you have time usually to use the rule is when you're writing if you're typing an email right you can stop and go let me see is that right okay so writing is a good

example of how you can use your conscious learning you can fix your writing now here's the weird thing even though you know the rule and you have time to use it most people don't use the rule even when they have time why because there's a third condition of monitor use and that is you have to be focused on correctness you have to be focused your mind has to be focused consciously on how you're saying something rather than why what you're saying you have to be focused on how you're saying it rather than what you're saying

what you're saying and that is something that most of us have a great difficulty doing most of us are very interested in meaning you want to understand what a person is saying and so when you're talking when you're communicating you're focused on what you're saying you're not focused on how you're saying it you're not focused on the rules and we know from ex from from psychological studies that it's it's impossible to focus on both things at the same time you can't focus on what you're saying and how you're saying it the rules you can't focus

those things on the same you can go back and forth you can think of the what then think of the how then think of the what then think of the how but you can't do them both at the same time and quite honestly most people 95% of the time don't think about how they're saying things they think about what they're saying so even though you know the rule and you have time if you're not focused on how you're doing it you're probably not going to use it now there is one case where almost everyone has

all three conditions met they know the rule they have time to use it and they're focused on the how they're focused on the correctness of of what they're doing and that one case is a grammar exam if you give your if you give your students a test in grammar and you teach them the rules and you give them time to finish their test and they're focused on the correctness because that's what the test is about well then they'll use their monitor so what is grammar study good for mostly it's mostly good for grammar tus but

it's not very good good for daily communication why because normally when we're speaking or when we're listening even when we're writing we don't focus on the how we focus on the what and of course you need time and you need to know the rule so those three conditions are very difficult to meet that's why even though theoretically you can use that learning to fix your writing or perhaps even to fix you're speaking it's very difficult to do it not impossible but you can do it now here's something that you have to understand as a teacher

you're going to become an English teacher you're interested in English you maybe you're really interested in grammar you like studying English okay you like grammar rules I do too okay I love picking up a grammar book and going oh really oh that's interesting okay and and and your teacher does and Amir probably does we like it we are a special group language teachers most people most real people they don't love what we love okay we love it you may love language you love it you're a te that's why you're becoming a teacher and which is

great okay that's wonderful we need wonderful people like you to become teachers but you have to remember that not everyone loves grammar rules like you love grammar rules not everyone gets a certain excitement when they pick up a grammar book okay you and I were different we're a little weird okay we're not like normal people normal people don't love what we love okay it's okay I love it you love it that's good okay but most most people are not like that so even though you can use the rule it doesn't mean that your students will

use the rule because you love this stuff and they don't they just want to be able to speak English and listen to English okay and that leads us to our fourth big idea the fourth big idea is called uh depending on it's it has different names um usually if you if you look for the four the five ideas about crashing it'll be called the input hypothesis remember we talked about input and output right the input hypothesis Steve crashion Dr crashion now often calls this the comprehension hypothesis but it's the same thing okay so if you

if you see input hypothesis it means the same thing as comprehension hypothesis here's what the input hypothesis says it says it answers a big question okay remember earlier on the first thing I talked about was acquisition versus learning right and the question is how do we get acquisition you can't get it from studying you can't get it from your conscious knowledge so how do you get acquisition this is the most important question to answer today tonight in this talk how do we get acquisition the input hypothesis gives us the answer here's the answer we get

acquisition I'm going to use the verb we acquire languages acquisition comes from the verb to acquire to get okay to acquire means to get we acquire languages by getting comprehensible understandable English understandable language if we can understand the language we're going to acquire the language we're going to understand we're going to get it we're going to get it into our acquisition acquisition comes from comprehensible input now what is input I've already talked about input right there are two kinds of input where's my listening and reading okay listening and reading you can listen to language and

you can read language both of these are input but you can't just listen and read to any language it has to be language that's comprehensible in other words you have to understand it now some of you there might speak Spanish but if I I were let's say I wanted to teach you Spanish okay I I was a Spanish teacher for a couple of years if I speak to you in Spanish and you don't understand what I'm saying you will not acquire [Music] Spanish did you understand that no most of you did not understand that if

you don't understand Spanish you probably didn't understand what I said you could listen to me speaking Spanish like that quickly for a hundred years and you'll never acquire Spanish okay in order to acquire Spanish or any language you have to understand the message you have to understand what I'm saying now remember we talked about acquisition as being something that's unconscious you don't need to do anything with your brain all you need to do is to understand the language and the more language you understand the more you will acquire now you might think well Jeff how

can I if I don't know it how can I understand it that's a very good question right if you don't know it how are you going to be able to understand it for example let's take the third person singular uh uh verb s he runs she runs uh uh he runs he walks and so forth in order to acquire that rule unconsciously you need to hear or read sentences that have that rule in them many many times times okay for many years probably that's comprehensible input as long as the language contains things that you don't

understand yet rules structures vocabulary that will help you acquire those Lang that that language now one of the Expressions that we use when we talk about the input hypothesis is um Hightech chalkboard here I + one I + one I is input but in here I means where your language is right now okay so if you're a beginner your language is here if you're intermediate your language is here if you're Advanced your language is up here okay I is where you are right now in order to acquire new language unconsciously you need to get language

that has something that you a little bit above your current level a little bit higher than where you are right now you can still understand it you can understand 95% of it but there's a little bit there that you haven't acquired yet that's the perfect that's the perfect environment to acquire new language so it has to be I usually say to my students it has to be mostly comprehensible not 100% because if it's 100% comprehensible there's nothing left for you to acquire let me give the example here of vocabulary let's say you're reading a sentence

and you understand nine of the 10 words in the sentence but there's one word you don't understand however because you know the other nine words you can figure out what that tenth word is okay so um let's say the word is I'm gonna make up a word okay the word is Bizzle Bizzle it it's not a real word okay I just made that word up I invented that word okay bizel but let's say you're reading a sentence today I got into my bizzel and I started driving and I drove down the street and I stopped

and I turned my Bizzle off and I opened the door and I got out of my Bizzle and I went into the store what is a Bizzle it's a car right it's an automobile or maybe it's a truck okay it's something that you drive now you didn't know the word Bizzle when I started that sentence when I started that example I just taught you a new word that's not a real word Bizzle how did you figure it out I gave you comprehensible input I gave you language that you can understand and you use that language

to understand the part that you didn't know before that's what the comprehension hypothesis the input hypothesis is all about we acquire language when we can understand most of the language that we're getting but there's still a little bit we perhaps don't understand you want to make that ratio like 95% to 5% okay you want to give students language that they can mostly understand now how do you get them to understand it we'll talk about that in a second okay but just for now the principle you have to understand here is that we acquire languages we

get language into our acquisition system by understanding messages by understanding language now you don't speak Spanish most of you right you don't speak Spanish but I could teach you Spanish right now I could say Hola May je je see okay did you understand that I hope so if you understood what I just said you did everything you need to do to acquire Spanish all you have to do is understand the input comprehensible understandable input that's what we want to do for our students we want to present language in such a way that it's new but

it's understandable they can understand what we're saying that's what you want you want to be comprehensible you want your classroom to be full of comprehensible input understandable language if you do that and you keep providing more a little bit more difficult little bit more difficult little bit more difficult eventually slowly okay it takes time slowly your students will start to get better they'll start to acquire the language unconsciously and they won't even know it they'll come to class maybe two or three weeks after you start or a month after you start or maybe two months

after you start and maybe they'll start to say one word or two words okay it's just like a little baby right little baby when a little baby's born mother talks to it hopefully the father talks to it okay Brother Talks to it sister talks to it what does the baby say right nothing the baby can't say anything yet but the baby is listening the baby is acquiring language and maybe 8 months or 12 months or 14 months later all all of a sudden the baby will say mama papa I'm not sure what is in farsy

probably something like Dada or Papa something like that okay and the baby will say you know milk want milk right the baby starts off very slowly but during that 14 months that the baby was listening the baby was acquiring okay the brain is working all the time okay as long as you're hearing language or reading language your brain is working you don't even know it's working but it's working and if it's getting language it can understand which is why when you talk to a baby right you don't go um okay now Amir um what do

you think about the weather today is it's it's kind of cold out isn't it you probably don't say that you say things like ball want the ball ball you use Easy language same for your students your students are like little babies okay they they don't have anything in their acquisition so you need to move slowly with them when you're providing comprehensible input also just like a baby it will take time before they're able to we would say produce output spontaneously remember we talked about input and output right output this side that's speaking and writing it

takes time there's what we call a silent period a period between the time that you first start hearing language and the time that you're able to produce language spontaneously automatically without thinking about it that silent period can take a long time depending on how much input for a baby it takes somewhere between I don't know seven eight months and maybe 15 months sometimes there are some little children that don't talk until they're two years old or even two and a half three years old it's unusual usually they're talking by you know somewhere between eight and

15 months but sometimes it can take a long time that's okay your brain their brains the brains of your students they acquiring don't worry they're acquiring as long as you're giving them comprehensible input okay so there is a silent period and it does take a long time all right fifth big idea and then we're going to spend a few minutes talking about how you actually give students comprehensible input fifth big idea is called the affective filter now let me go back to this diagram here it's a little messy now going to write a new going

to do a new a new diagram okay so this is your brain and this is input and this is output okay so we have input here and output here and input is ears and eyes right reading and listening sometimes it's possible that some people will read a lot of English or they'll listen a lot of English but the brain and it's comprehensible input but the brain doesn't acquire it why we think that for some people there's something called an affective or emotional if you will filter and this filter this filter blocks or prevents the input

from getting into your brain why maybe the person is anxious they're nervous or they have what we would s call in English low self-esteem they don't think they're a very good language learner I'm not very good at this I'm never going to do well maybe they have low motivation they don't want to be in your classroom okay you know the student that's sits back like this and uh boring okay there are lots of emotional or affective reasons why someone doesn't acquire the language that might block the input so you give them lots of comprehensible input

but for lots of different psychological reasons the input doesn't get into their brain it doesn't get into their language acquisition device we would call it that part of your brain that is dedicated to language acquisition a big reason I think why some students get this affect of filter one reason is sometimes teachers correct them too much every time they make a mistake the teacher goes oh no no it's not that it's this well if I corrected every mistake you made if you started speaking English to me what would you do stop talking right I'm afraid

you're going to correct my mistake nobody likes to be corrected you did that wrong okay my wife she's always correcting me no you did that wrong nobody wants error correction nobody wants to be corrected all the time so as a teacher you have to remember that you don't want to the expression we use raise your affective filter you don't want to get your students so nervous and so afraid that they can't even acquire the language even if you give them good comprehensible input that's why we want a relaxed environment in your class you want your

students to to be relaxed to be comfortable to feel safe okay not to feel nervous or anxious because that's actually going to prevent the language from getting into their brain okay a big part of the a of filter a big part of helping students is getting them see to see themselves as part of the club as part of the group you know some of you you have hobbies right outside of school maybe some of you I don't know like running right I'm I'm I'm a swimmer okay I like to swim I see myself as a

swimmer when I wake up in the morning and I go to the pool I'm a swimmer I say to myself I'm a swimmer that's who I am that's part of my identity that's who I see I am okay I'm I'm an American I'm a Californian I'm an Irish American my relatives are from Ireland okay all of these things are part of I'm a man all of these things are part of my identity who I see I am who who I am okay it's how I identify myself if somebody says Amir says could you introduce yourself

I say sure I'm Jeff mcquillin I'm from Los Angeles I'm a linguist I'm an English teacher okay those are identities those are things you identify with you want your students to identify with the group of people who speak English you want them to think of themselves as English speakers and that way you will will lower that eff to filter suddenly they'll be more interested and more motivated and have less anxiety in your classroom so you want to create a little Club you are you are helping your students join the club of English speakers all right

that's very important it's important because that helps them acquire language all right now how do you actually make input comprehensible well I already gave you one example and that is visuals gestures okay quickly slowly okay that's a gesture facial expressions happy bad right visuals pictures this is um Japanese picture of a Japanese I can't see that K is a Japanese uh uh screen okay and this is a picture of um a Sumerian necklace from Mesopotamia from from the Middle East all right I can sit there and I can talk about the picture here's a picture

this is called a necklace a neck this is your neck this is where you wear your necklace okay visuals are very important in making input comprehensible uh how fast you talk most English teachers talk to fast even intermediate English teachers they talk too fast when you talk really fast you can't understand what the other person is saying and that's really difficult when you talk too fast the other person can't understand what you say and that's really difficult don't worry about your students thinking oh well how will I ever understand native speakers they saw everyone talks

really fast right don't worry about that that will come with time that will come later first you have to get the language into your acquisition first the language must be comprehensible and to be comprehensible you need to speak slowly speak clearly open your mouth okay open the mouth speak clearly and uh slowly now you don't have to speak this slowly all the time no okay but for most teachers when I look at a teacher in their classroom usually the teacher is speaking too fast so slow down don't worry okay your students will understand more if

you speak a little bit more slowly um easy vocabulary easy syntax all of learning in general all of education is taking what you know and relating it to something you don't know that's education all education is here's what I know here's something I don't know I use what I know to figure out what I don't know I apply the knowledge I know to the things I don't know just like in the sentence about bizel right you took the words you knew and you applied them to the word you didn't know when you're teaching students you

need to teach them something what okay you need to pick things that they have some background knowledge about they know something already and you're going to give them something else so what do your students know about well it depends on how old they are right it depends on where they are do your students know something about Iranian geography I hope so okay they study geography in school right so maybe you're going to maybe your English lesson will be talking about the map of Iran but in English talking about mountains talking about your beautiful country talking

about the desert okay why is that a good topic geography is a great topic if students know something about it so think about what your students know and try to talk about and give them things to read about topics that they have some knowledge about that's called giving them background knowledge the background knowledge makes the input comprehensible okay all right um one more thing that everybody loves everybody loves a good story good language teaching should be good storytelling telling stories is a wonderful way to get students interested and to provide good comprehensible input this morning

this morning I woke up at 5:30 in the morning I got up and I got into my car and I drove to a pool and I went into the pool and I started swimming started swimming there was a a man a gentleman standing next to the pool okay he was standing next to the pool and he said he said hey Chef I stopped I said yeah what did he say do you want to know what he said to me of course you do that's a good story I just made that story up he didn't say

anything to me okay he didn't say anything to me but you were paying attention I bet every one of you was listening every one of you is going okay yeah yeah and then what happened that's a story stories provide excellent comprehensible input give your student St good stories either to read or just tell them a story okay everything can be a story history can be a story science can be a story art can be a story geography can be a story you can make a story of lots of different things tell them a story in

English that they already know in farsy they'll love it why because they'll understand it better you can understand things in another language about a topic you understand better then about a topic you don't understand so tell stories lots of stories okay how are we doing do we want to take a few uh I have maybe five more minutes we can take some questions yeah that'd be really great Jeff um so first let me just give you round of applause on behalf of all the participants jff and we can probably also send you Hearts I mean

it's it's not going to cost us anything to to send you virtual Hearts so thank you so so let's open the floor to our uh young and beginning teachers and see if they have any questions because we have some of the wean teachers with us too the director of studies Pua is also with us here Yolanda is also one of our most experienced teachers she's also with us I can see Sarah is also with us uh but the rest are I suppose OS young and beginner teachers so let's see if they have any questions they

can ask their questions guys any questions you can unmute yourselves uh and ask uh Jeff um or you can just type in the chat box MH okay let's see puya I suppose yeah you raised the hand yeah go ahead please uh Professor it was great like always I greatly appreciate your time uh what I wanted to ask you is about natural order hypothesis uh you said there's a fixed order um uh of let's say learning or requiring say things um is it true for all Lang I mean different language speakers I if we consider English

as uh let's say language we want to learn or acquire this let's say natural order uh is the same uh in in terms of difficulty or things like that for all different languages I mean the person who speaks uh Spanish has the same order of these grammatical points compared to one who has farc as his or her native speaker native language a wonderful what an intelligent teacher you you people have you should be very thankful that's a beautiful of studies yeah thank you so very much thank you excellent excellent question the answer is yes however

if you speak Spanish and you're learning English you're going to probably acquire it more quickly than if you speak Chinese or Arabic but the order of acquisition will still be the same but you will move through it more quickly now why why will someone who knows Spanish move through the order more quickly than someone who knows farsy or someone who knows Chinese or Indonesian the answer you now know is that if you speak Spanish you're able to get you English and Spanish are more close right than English and farsy which means that the English that

the Spanish person hears is more comprehensible it's easier to get comprehensible input if you speak Spanish and are acquir in English than if you speak farsy in acquiring English why because English and Spanish are closer together as languages right so I know Spanish for example I also know some Italian I know some French okay Italian is really easy for me why because it's very similar to Spanish I go I went through the natural order in Italian much faster than the natural order in German uh even though English is a Germanic language or the natural order

in uh say Chinese I tried to learn Chinese ones very very difficult for me right so I'm going to move through the natural order more slowly because I'm getting less comprehensible input than I I would if I you know spoke a language that was Say closer to Chinese okay so that's that's the answer to the question thank you thank you so much Jeff uh Yolanda SAR Moana have you got any questions or uh I know Jeff has other commitments coming after this session so we don't have much time left yoland yeah Yolanda yeah hi everybody

hello H Dear Professor it was great very fruitful I just wanted to say that this is not just me this is my daughter and I who are listening to yeah AA is here she's 15 she's just enjoying the meeting thank thank you so much it was very fruitful thank you well thank you Yolanda and hello to your daughter as well that's wonderful to hear yes um Jeff I think we can have the last uh few words before we goodbye I personally thought Jeff this was the most crafted uh talk of yours to our audience for

English teachers and a special thanks for that I mean you talked about this theories in a way which was the most meaningful for language uh teachers I mean there are theories in books we read but sometimes we are unable to find the relevance to our profession you built that bridge tonight for us and I for Van I'm so much thankful to you uh I learned a lot tonight well thank you thank you so much thank you so much and uh thank you so much uh everybody for for attending tonight and uh all the best to

everyone thank you Jeff and have a wonderful day goodbye thank you all right bye byee bye bye everyone please