Dr. Bill VanPatten: How To Learn Languages (According To Science)

all right and we are recording and so uh Bill I'm just going to uh Dive Right In uh could you introduce yourself for our viewers or mostly listeners who uh do not know who you are especially as it pertains to uh language learning all right well thank you Lois for that uh my name is Bill Van Patton I'm a former academic I am no longer teaching or or or actually doing research right now um I left Academia to write fiction fulltime so that's what I do now um but for 30 years plus um I was

a professor of uh uh Linguistics language acquisition bilingualism um and language teaching and have written gosh should I should I tell people what I've written how much I've written um something like eight or nine books eight or nine edited volumes about 200 chapters and books book articles and I've written textbooks in Spanish and French um I've done T Series um movies for language Learners um I've written materials for language Learners just all kinds of things I was pretty much at all I was not just a scholar I also worked Hands-On with teachers and language Learners

as well throughout my career so that's what I did for a very very very long time before I moved back to my home state of California and started writing full-time so that's me in a netsh great yeah and um so it seems to me like when you take a look at the language learning world at least not from you know like the like an academics perspective on the internet at least you have sort of a divide of uh you know you have the people who take like a more let's say classical like normal approach with

let's do the textbooks let's do the apps and so on and now we see more and more people doing the input I think uh in part thanks to you and Dr Stephen crash now some people are actually pretty hardcore into like hey this is all about input like this is pretty much the only thing that matters and so um uh I guess what I wanted to ask ask here is that which side I mean I have an idea of which side you're on but uh what's your perspective on like the biggest miscon conceptions that people

have like normal people have on uh language learning I think the biggest misconception people have and I'm going to come back to two things you just said Lis about do the input thing um the biggest misconception people have is what language is people think that language that there are rules and and things that you can learn like things you learn in your textbooks right like rules about how X works Spanish or how y Works in French or how Z Works in German um and these are found on pages of textbooks I think those rules that

they learn are what winds up in their heads that's the biggest and most important misconception of both Learners and anybody working with Learners have so you can up any page in my in my old radio show I used to have t with bbp I used to tell people what's on page 32 of the textbook is not what winds up in your head and um so you can learn all these things all you want but that's none of that stuff is what underlies actual language use when you're involved in communication um with a caveat so when

when you I think you said earlier about do the input it's the only thing that matters it is the only input as wear that what is is the only thing that matters when it comes to acquiring language that you that ultimately underlies Communication in language use um that is true now well let me stop there and see what your reactions to what I just said if I can if you want me to clarify something or or if you want me to get examples of what I mean how's that let me ask you how how you

what I just said right so my understanding now is that you're not rejecting the fact that uh like output or I don't know like learning grammar and stuff like that this is not useless but when it comes to actual uh like eventually communicating in the language input is really like a necessity this is the only thing that that matters is this correct well it yeah it's input plus the things that already exist in your head um as a learner as a human being that allow for language growth um we all possess mechanisms in our head

that actually recreate language in our head and allows language to evolve because language does evolve in our head language is not for example learning a bunch of rules and you accumulate these over time not at all that's just not how language acquisition happens and so what your brain slash mind does is it picks data and pieces of data over time and you uses those um as part of language growth and I do mean data so for example you like you can memorize a chart but that chart does not mean data for language acquisition um so

if you're learning something like the present tense of a language you don't learn the present tense of a language you learn bits and pieces of what is entailed in the present tense because there are underlying abstract features of language that drive how those things are Bit by Bit by Bit acquired over time so that the language system can grow and evolve um here's a good example from Spanish um so in Spanish I I can tell you take the verb live in Spanish for example so B I live be you live B he she lives BOS

we live B you all live in Spain and then B you all live or they live in in my dialog in the my dial dialect in the rest of Spanish okay nobody learns that chart um and you don't even learn um you you don't even acquire over time that chart in the earliest stages of language acquisition every single language learner around the world acquiring language first creates what's called a tenseless system where you have no tense even though your language your first language may have tense that you mark verbs and show this present tense past

tense and so on um Everybody in the big stages has a tenseless language which is why Learners of Spanish and the early stages take the Form B he she lives um because it's the form without tense it has no person number features and it has no tense marking and so they use that as a what's called a base form and and they tend to use that everywhere to talk about living right so y y y y beginning learner might say when it's supposed to be beevil for I live right um and then over time the

next stage that happens is the system realizes oh this language I'm learning has tense as an abstract feature the system doesn't know yet what has present past and future marking what those markings are if there's multiple kinds of marking like present perfect past perfect doesn't know any of those he just knows there's this thing called tense and so then the system starts to incorporate some of the things like bibo and Bs are the next ones to to emerge in the system for I live and you live because the learner is now be beginning to Mark

present tense the learner may not have past tense or future tense but by marking bibo and B as the person that that learner is is that learner system is saying there's tense in this language and I got to put something on the verbs that marks tense and then later on the other ones come in bbos and B and BBs and all those kind they come in over time they don't all come in at once they don't um they they come in in bits and Jabs and pieces over time and while the learner is working on

those things the learner may also the system may also recognize hey there is such a thing is a past tense in this language and so it's not just that there's tense which we call with the capital T tense uh as a feature but small T tense past present fature there's ways to Mark things in this language so while the learner is getting those bits and pieces of things that Mark the present tense verb forms that system is beginning to sketch in something for past tense and in Learners of Spanish what we've noticed is the first

thing they do is a stress shift because in Spanish um present tense whether it's present tense subjunctive present tense indicative whatever present tense forms are in like three or four different kinds of present tense the stress is on the root of the verb but once you get outside of the present tense the stress moves to an ending so whether it's past or future or conditional or something else the stress moves and so when Learners are trying to work with past tense the first thing you get them to do is they they they put so b

um or BVO become BV or B or or BVO or something they put a stress on because the system has start to to notice that there's a stress shift that marks tance so my my point in telling you the story is that that system is evolving very slowly by pulling bits and pieces of data from the environment to construct a system over time and and this would say over and over and over again with Learners whether in a classroom or not in a classroom this is just what they do um so so that's that's an

example of what I mean by evolve or grow over time and that's whether you get rules or don't get rules or where you study charts or don't study charts it pretty much is what Learners do un right I I suppose then the question is um so the system evolves bit by bit and uh are you saying that it evolves bit by bit in sort of a not necessar like a sequential way like you get a textbook you learn about the present you learn about the past uh it's not going to evolve exactly like this no

no your your brain is working multiple things at once as it sees fit because language has language with this set of abstract features has its own timetable in your head this just as it does with Children Learning a first language so second language Learners have Tim taes in their heads that they are unaware of it's just the way language works right now I want to go back for a minute and and talk a little bit about language again about rules and charts and so on because as I said the biggest one of the biggest misconceptions

people have is that they can learn rules and somehow these rules are what's in their head so let's take a very very simple example from English because I'm assuming that your listeners is this video is this recording is this going to be audio I don't know if this is going to be but so if they're seeing us or hear hearing us or both seeing and hearing us yeah both yeah I want your I want your listener I want your listener viewers let me put it that way um to get a very simple example from English

because I'm assuming most of them speak English okay so you can go online you can go in a textbook of ESL you can go to your grade school teacher in the sixth grade in the United States or Great Britain and and you learn that there are such things as subject pronouns and object pronouns right so you'll see things like I you he we and you are subjects but then me you him her us you and them are objects right and you're told that you know use subject pronouns with subjects and you use object pronouns with

objects or after prepositions and so on okay great um there's two problems with that first of all what's the definition of a pronoun if I ask you that Louis because you you studied so what's a pronoun what is if you were if if you were to read a definition or textbook definition for a pronoun what is a pronoun okay well this is going to be super embarrassing I mean uh you don't have you can just tell me Bill just bill you tell me though what it is if I give an embarrassing answer I'm just going

to edit it out anyways but uh a pronoun is I mean it's just like I uh you he she is this what It is Well the definition of a pronoun is it stands in place of a noun so if I mention if I mention either you Lois or the interviewer and then in the next sentence rather than repeat that I can put in he so he stands in for your name or the interviewer or the man with the headphones on or whatever right so a pronoun stands in for a noun okay that's only works for

third person so he him she her they and them can refer to the interviewer the woman on the corner the boys standing over there the two dogs okay so but with I you and we those Pro those aren't pronouns because they don't stand in for anything so when I say I um I'm glad to be here Lois there there's nothing there's nothing before that I that I stands for it's not replacing anything so right away in that chart of these subject downs and object subject pronouns object pronouns you see there's two different kinds of things

real pronouns and something else so your head already has something abstract in it where pronouns can only be third person pronouns aren't first and second person so you're there's no such thing as a first and second person pronoun they are functionally and abstractly linguistically different from third person so the fact that they're in a chart together is pretty meaningless um because they're not the same thing so that's one thing but now look at this let's let's just look at the rule of use subject pronouns for subjects and object pronouns for objects great Okay so that

works great really simple sentences like um I'm glad to be here I use I as a subject of am glad to be here I can't use me I can't say oh Louis me I'm glad to be here no that's not English right so you go okay that rule Works um but then you get into situations like this uh who's there suppose I knock on your door so you say who's there I say I am but I can't say me am right but who's there me I can't say I who's there I no I can't do

that yeah but technically that that thing that comes that me or that I is a subject of a verb so why can't I put I in there even though there's no verb because presumably there's a verb that's understood to be there you can't do that now you're get into compound noun uh compound subjects so um I can say well uh LS and I are recording right now I can say Louis and me are recording right now I can say he and I are recording right now I can say him and me are recording right now

I can say me and him are recording right now I can use just about any one of those things I want as a subject in a compound that so this idea of a subject versus object gets obliterated in um in a compound subject except notice that you can't do the following with a compound so I can't say um I can't say um me and he are recording that sounds awful to an English speaker it's got to be me and him but why can I say me and he where's my rule about subjects or subjects and

objects or objects right and then look at objects in English now just about anything can be an object so um you can say um Lewis gave the book to me and her Lewis gave the book to her and I yes you can say that it's perfectly fine and spoken English these days you can she he he gave the book to her and I so my point being is that this rule you have that what's a subject with the object just goes out the window the minute you look at the way English works and what every

second language learner acquires about English as well as first language learner so there's something much more abstract and complex about these things called I you he she him me they them us we and so on there's something much more abstract and complex going on that governs how these things actually work in a language that cannot be captured by textbook rules so then I suppose um uh what most people are wondering right now is okay so uh language is more complex than what is outlined in a textbook so then does that mean that textbooks are not

useful um or is it just the way that they're organized is just it's just not optimal what should we do to learn grammar okay or just learn a language in general it it it's not that language is much more complex it's just that languages are abstract what's in your head what we call mental representation for language is complex but also abstract it defies everyday language to describe what's in your head um and and linguists argue about they've got some things about language they all agree on there are some things that they're arguing about this the

the the micro parts of how to explain something or how something actually functions but every person person working in language science would agree that whatever you want to call language your head is both complex and Abstract it's not something to be captured on a textbook page it just can't it just cannot full stop period um so what does that mean for using textbooks and so on I I like to talk to people about baby teeth and adult teeth okay you may not remember this Louis but you had baby teeth when you were real little right

we all did we had baby teeth and you might there might even be a photo of you when you're like two years old or three years old with a tooth missing right right so what happens is that you have these baby teeth that you have that function early on but they're not there for the rest of your life they're not there to perform the function of chewing and making sounds CU we use our teeth to make sounds like dental fricatives and things like that so they're going to be replaced by a d teeth so what

I tell people is that if you learn these textbook rules they're like baby teeth in the beginning stages they might help you eek out some things and and perform some language like behaviors but what you're really doing is waiting for your adult teeth to come in and your adult teeth come in because of the interaction your mind has with input in the environment so those textbook rules that you learn um and that you eek out sentences early on and you're slow and you're halting that's your baby teeth and then eventually your adult teeth come in

and push the baby teeth out so that so that those that textbook knowledge you have basically Falls the Wayside because it's not usable it it it it's not what language is um so that's that's analogy or metaphor I like to give people that if you're going to use textbooks and what are they good for textbook rules they're good in those early stages when you're heavily heavily monitoring your speech and you're trying to put sentences together because you don't have language in your head yet so you use these textbook rules and this this Tech and learn

and vo and the same is true for vocabulary so you these things that you've learned explicitly you Cobble them together in real time to try to do something with language um but it's not really language yet it's baby teeth and as your system builds up over time the acquired system builds up over the time the baby teeth fall out the acquired system takes on more and more it's almost can be like a switch sometimes it's literally like you don't even know it happens like all of a sudden the acquired system just takes over every language

like behavior um and you're performing almost completely with acquired language and whatever you those rules you had before that you learned explicitly just follow the ways side yeah this definitely Echoes my own experience with learning uh you know multiple languages uh where in the beginning you may learn with a textbook and a vocabulary list but especially when it comes to grammar rules uh over time even you know I learned English I I had to learn like the rules but now I don't really remember the specifics it's just much much more the case of thanks to

the rules I was able to start noticing things and you know parsing the language perhaps a little bit uh it was perhaps a little bit more uh uh easier than if I had to uh you know jump jump straight into a bunch of listening and read in but right now I just can't really remember the exact rules it's just more of a yeah like a a raft I guess it helps uh but I suppose then uh a lot of listeners are looking for you know like what is the approach that they should take they're like

okay just tell me what I should do and I'm going to do it so a lot of people turn to apps because it's very uh you know that the whole syllabus is laid out in front of them so it's pretty easy but uh my question here is uh I do this with every guest that I have so let's imagine that from next week Monday uh you have a year just one year to learn a language and this is your full-time job you don't have to worry about cleaning the house about writing books about uh I

don't know anything this is going to be a full-time job and you're going to have to learn a language that is let's say fairly challenging I'm not sure do you have a language that you would like to learn not at this point no so okay let's say um I'm going to say uh Korean okay so this is this is pretty challenging pretty far removed from uh you know English so you have a year an entire year and at the end of the year you really need to reach as high of a level as possible otherwise

you know there are going to be some very bad consequences I don't know like uh Divine judgment or anything but point is there's uh like huge Stakes you have motivation what you're saying yes um so what is going to be your daily routine like uh what sort of program would you uh follow um I mean that's a really good question um I don't know what I would do in that kind of circumstance I I'm guessing that what I would do is figure out some way early on to use something that's going to help me just

learn some words so I can bootstrap myself into meaning and I might learn one or two things like okay so Korean is an object final language so that means it's a head final language I'm a linguist so I'm going to call the head final language so that's going to tell me certain things about Korean because I'm a linguist I know that um object I mean head final languages do certain things that head initial languages don't do okay good so I know that um that means it's going to be case marking I know that's going to

happen in Korean um and so I'm basically probably what I'm going to going to do is try to get the best I can whatever means possible I I I don't know any apps just learn some words because as soon as it can bootstrap myself into listening and reading that's what I'm going to do I want to get myself as quickly as possible a point where I can interact with the language and process as much meaning based language as possible that let me back up and tell you how I learn French because French is my SEC

my first languages are English and Spanish so then I learned French as a second language right and I can't say my skills in French are very high because I basically gave up at some point because I didn't need to learn any more than I was learning or acquiring I didn't care anymore to be honest with I didn't have the motivation as you were talking about and so um what I did was um I took a class like everybody else I just took a class um I took like two years of French and but that wasn't

every day like you're talking about 8 hours a day for year I just took classes and learned what I could learn from those classes and then because of where I was I sought out French speakers um French conversation groups and I had an office mate who spoke in French um I did what I could to get as much language exposure as possible that wasn't textbooks or practicing and then I did things like watch French movies I uh went to Paris for a summer I did everything I possibly could to get as much exposure to French

in meaning based communicative context as possible and that was before I knew much about language acquisition by the way that was an intuition I had and so I was like just give me enough to bootstrap me so I could I can comprehend something and then I just threw myself at the mercy of French speakers like okay I'm G to see what I get out of this um and I'm assuming that's what I would do if I were learning Korean what what can I get at the beginning where would I get it to just get some

basic things about Korean so that I can then jump into it and forget about textbooks and forget about roles and everything else right yeah and um definitely there's also the fact that just all the textbooks and the apps and stuff is it's just um it's so boring I mean at some point if you just do that all day every day you're just going to give up so uh so then the question is also uh you do a lot of input but how important is actually focusing on you know output actually you know talking and uh

writing does this actually help you improve into the language or is this just a consequence of getting getting a lot of reading and listening it's it's largely a consequence and so um I always tell people that if you look at what language Learners do at different stages of development whether they're I won't say beginners because beginners have a very hard time but intermediate speakers Advanced speakers even and and then more advanced speakers making output in speaking forget about writing because writing is writing is is a separate weird thing that involves processes that are slightly different

not slightly but different from speaking cuz in speaking you're in real time there's time pressure um you can't go back and correct you can't edit what you're doing you are like you and I right now um you know I write fiction for a living now right so when I write in English for example I'm constantly modering what I'm saying I I'll I'll I'll type a sentence wait wait wait that's not what she was I go back and go no let do this and I'm I'm just constantly monitoring what I'm putting down on paper that is

very hard to do in oneon-one real time speaking so what I tell speaking doesn't make you learn language it can't because that it doesn't the the data for learning language are in the input you're exposed to your brain is hardwired to incorporate language from the environment um end of story but what speaking does do is get people to talk to you and get people interact with you so you get more language you get more input so here's an anecdote um about myself when I was um teaching in Quebec One Summer Quebec Canada or Quebec as

we like to say in United States and I had invited to teach there in the summer at Laval University in Quebec City and um my French is probably like intermediate high at that point um I didn't have to teach in French which was a good thing because I probably wouldn't have been able to do it um but I was invited to lots of people's houses and dinner parties and so on and I went to one one dinner party and there were people speaking really fast French and they're from a different part of Canada and man

I was lost like oh my God this is not work and I tried to jump in the conversation but mostly I just sat there as opposed to another dinner party I went to where the people spoke slower they were more deliberate in how they said things and thought things and they really attempted to include me in the conversation and so I felt more comfortable speaking even though my French was not good right it was far from perfect but the more I interact with them the more they talk to me the more they talk to me

the more I heard French and and I remember that that that that particular gender party I walked away going these are the people I need to interact with these These are these are my people right um and not because I could practice my French but because I could get them to talk to me you and um so I tell people that speaking a second language um when you're not Advanced even even when you're Advanced technically um is it's not a way to practice language or get language it's a it's a way to get more language

from other people and other sources so you your system can keep building and growing yeah it's uh also I think about the I actually thought about this uh recently where I'm constantly trying to get sources of input like movies and uh podcasts and stuff like that and I guess uh the struggle is really finding interesting stuff I think in English you know for English Learners I mean English Learners are so blessed because there is a massive amount of stuff on the Internet available for free but if you're learning other other languages even you Japanese it's

like how do I find good stuff it's um it's harder and so actually talking with people uh they're going to talk to you and this is to me like the the the best like the most interesting content because we're having a conversation and we're talking about you know our stuff so uh and then you get to make friends with people from other cultures so this is really great uh one of my concerns with um you know talking with people is yes you get a lot you get a lot of input and it's a lot of

fun but a lot of people are concerned about if you start speaking early or not necessarily early early but at a point where you tend to maybe you didn't have enough input or you're still making mistakes is there a possibility that these mistakes are going to become you know patterns in your mind that are then going to become very hard to uh you know remove from your speech is this a valid concern well first of all I I always tell people look at first language Learners is that what happens to a 2-year-old there's a 2-year-old

freeze that speaking like a two or threeyear old no by the time they're four they're speaking different by the time they're speaking differently by the time they're eight they're speaking differently and so on for the rest of their lives so theoretically no it's not that speaking imperfectly somehow does something to you and you can't keep acquiring that's not the case um now with that said that's theoretically with that said second language acquisition is slightly different even though it uses the same processes as first language acquisition even though at the core first and second language acquisition

are fundamentally the same thing there is something about second language acquisition that um causes people to be non-native like that's not because they spoke early or somehow they fossilize I hate that term they fossilize or pattern stuck in their head and there's no such thing as patterns anyway that's that's that's not what's going on it's it's it's it's one of two things or combination of both one is what second language Learners undergo that first language Learners don't undergo is a societal thing which is that's good enough first language Learners don't settle for that's good enough

because they really want to be part of a speech Community they are part language becomes their identity that's not true for second language learners for the most part so they don't have the same stake in learning a second language that first language Learners do and that's that's external to the language processing language learning mechanisms themselves so second L either abandoned they stop they slow down they don't care anymore like my French my French is not improving I can tell you probably to your are you're native French speaker Lewis yeah that's right yeah yeah I'm not

OB and so You' probably hear me speak French go oh my God he speaks pretty lousy French but I'm going to tell you it's good enough for me I don't care I don't want to learn French I'm perfectly fine with what I have sure yeah and so second language Learners do that um for whatever reasons that are not linguistically related or psych linguis related they're effectively related or again they're outside the language making mechanism that cause the other thing is that we know from second language research is that there can be some leakage even though

you need access to input even though you interact with input even though that at their core first and second language acquisition are Fally the same second language Learners may have a first language system that leaks somehow I like the word leaks because we don't quite know how it works um leaks into um The Learning of the second language so that you might wind up with an accent you might wind up with some structural things that just are not going to sound native like we don't know why it happens it just does we have no idea

it doesn't happen to everybody you could have 100 people with the same first language learning English for example and they'll be on a wide scale of differences in how far they get and how Native like they are some sounding so native like like you speaking English I think you said that your a second language to you um sound like they native like then you got other people with your background learning English and they don't sound like you at all they sound like someone with an in a movie like a character in a movie and so

and we don't know we don't know what causes those differences we have no idea but we know they're not due to something like you spoke too soon or you you learned bad habits or no that's not that's not what happened at all we know that that's not what's going on yeah that that's actually reassuring because uh I'm trying to get back into uh learning Italian um which is quite easy for uh a French speaker I mean easy you know compared to uh to like other people but um um I was thinking of you know getting

like a tutor on uh on the internet to just uh you know speak but then I'm always debating in my mind I'm I going to form you know these bad patterns and stuff but apparently this is not too much of a concern but then um yeah this is very uh reassuring but then uh you talked about unip people there's a wide range of uh s you know people end up even with the same program with the same Focus probably with the same motivation they end up speaking at probably a different level of accuracy and I

suppose what a lot of my viewers and you know listeners are concerned with is uh accent like um I'm not even talking about like pronunciation some people talk with very good pronunciation they're it's very easy to understand them but still you know they have a very strong accent I feel like this is uh I don't think this is a problem adds a little bit of fun you know when someone speaks with an accent it's always like oh where do you come from and uh and stuff like that but a lot of people want to sound

you know native like and um I've talked about people who sound very native in different languages in French and English and Japanese um is there any way that people can develop or is it even realistic to aim to sound like a native person and if so what's what should people do to do this this I mean you can aim at anything you want um I think that's a Fool's erand in language learning language acquisition um because you may not have any control over that um individual differences are built in um to second language learning and

so you might set yourself up for expectations you can't meet so I I I just don't even talk about that stuff to people and if they bring it up I just go now that's not that's anything I'm concerned about and I don't think there's anything you can do to make yourself sound native like again we don't know why some people do and some people don't sound native like we don't know why some people get this far and some people don't get that far we just don't really know why so there's nothing that somebody like me

can tell an aspiring language learner what to do because we don't even know why it happens it just does um so there's no scientific basis no research evidence no research basis by which we can say we'll try this because we think this is what's going on in the human mind just no uh-uh it's just there's nothing we can tell you and just remember the individual differences are built into the fabric of life for everything we do not just language learning for everything and people again um if you try to compare yourself to other people um

and what they're doing with language um you're you're going to be sorry um just just concentrate on what you're doing and and if you want to sound like native like if you want to sound native like if that's your goal you might very well get to be native likee because that's just something inside you as doing that um but I I've never actually run across language Learners in my lifetime that haven't even said that so I don't I yeah I've never had that conversation in be I don't I don't know what what what I would

tell them not think about it because I've just never had that conversation so when you say native like uh are we talking about specifically pronunciation and accent or does this also include just uh correct use accurate use of the language well don't forget language language is multicomponential we talked about how complex it is so language consists of things like phology the sound system phonetics how those sounds are reproduced in real time um um then comprehension of those sounds so it's not just speaking but it's also comprehending sounds can you distinguish sounds like a native speaker

can um and then there's uh syntax which which are the properties that govern the nature of sentences um there's morphology the shapes of words whether they prefixes endings how you make how you turn a noun into a verb a verb into a noun all that kind of stuff then there's there's um semantics which is a link between structural components of the language and words and abstract meaning um not semantics like the way it's use every day but but abstract meaning um and then uh then there's pragmatics which is Speaker intent so when a speaker utter

makes an utterance it is is is a statement or is a person really asking a question is a person making a compliment or what is that speaker real trying to do when making that utterance um and then there are prootic Contours which is the um stress and Rhythm patterns um Pitch Contour all that kind so language is incredibly complex every a sentence of like five words has so many components interacting it's just boggles the mind how we even acquire language it just boggles the mind because all those things have to work at the same time

not just one and not just another but all of them at the same time when we speak or when we listen or when we read and so on so um when I when I say native like you can be native like across the board you can be native like in some domains native like in one domain native like is is the it depends on what aspect of language you want to look at right um and still on the topic of not like native likeness but specifically accent sometimes I think specifically in the in the case

of like uh in my case for example as a French speaker uh I sometimes I think I I feel like you know speaking with a French accent seems at least to my understanding for Americans or for English speakers like oh wow you're you're from France or uh you sound like uh I don't know you're you're like a French speaker whereas when they listen to me they're like I don't know it's kind of weird not a French speaker at least so yeah I suppose uh there's no point in trying to sound too native there's always a

little touch of uh it's interesting uh when you have an accent uh now onto a different topic I wanted to talk about uh teaching because I talked to uh Paul Nation yesterday and I um asked him like what is the biggest misconception of people like in the language of learning world and his answer was the role of uh teachers uh so essentially has uh answered well he talked about a lot of things but the role of a teacher is uh right now there's a lot of teaching going on uh which apparently he he did not

really agree with so what is your opinion on ideally in the best world possible what should a teacher uh do well I I I I don't know what Paul actually said to you I've read some of Paul's work of course I know who he is um and we probably would dovetail on some of the comments I'm about to make but I'll let him listen to this and watch this video and make his own determination but um I always when I talk to teachers say teachers and teaching is just a word we've got to get rid

of if you're interested in language acquisition um there are two ways to approach a language classroom language as subject matter matter and language as something to be acquired now most schools of education at least in the United States and my guess around the world when when quote unquote teachers are formed um they don't know much about language acquisition they know much about language they know much about education uh communication they just don't get any background in that instead they get backgrounds on what it means to be a formal educator so let's just say you're going

to get a a a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science in teaching in the United States with emphasis on Spanish or French or German or Russian you'll probably never take a course in linguistics you'll never take a course in language acquisition you'll never take a course in the nature of communication that that it just you just don't um and if you're in in in a school of education you might take a course on the teaching of languages and I can guarantee you in that course if you spend a weak on the nature of language

or weak on acquisition you'll be lucky most places don't even do that and so behind that approach is that you approach the language classroom like you would approach science math history geography name name another ma science some kind of science G chemistry right you have textbooks you have a teacher who teaches at students students learn and then they demonstrate their knowledge on a test or something and that's basically that's that's that's the main model for language classes around the world um and that's because language teachers see themselves as teachers now I try to tell people

that if you're interested in developing Proficiency in your learners or your goal is communication or you want to Foster language acquisition you have to get out of that mindset of being called a teacher because you can't really teach language you can only help it grow in the minds of Learners so imagine you're a farmer and you're trying to grow corn you can't make the corn do what the corn is not going to do right the corn is genetically predisposed to do certain things what the farmer does is make sure it gets water make sure there's

Sunshine make sure that Dirt has nutrients in it the farmer is basically facilitating the growth of the Corn but you put that little seed in the ground you have no control over what that seed is going to do because everything that seed needs to do everything that thing everything for that seed to become a corn stock and produce more corn is already in that seed and that's what language acquisition is like and so teachers are almost like Farmers I can't make a person learn language I can't teach language at them I'm more like a farmer

helping it grow in their heads um and so I've talked with teachers about this like you know what kind what would you like to call yourselves if you were focused on communication in the classroom and language acquisition and so on and they Banny about words like Oh I'm a language facilitator okay that sounds good or I help acquisition that sounds good you know they come up with all kinds of ways to reconceptualize themselves um and so I I just think that we need in language if our goal again is proficiency and development of communication need

to get away that idea of teaching and that yeah we might call the people in our classroom students but I prefer to call them Learners right yeah yeah yeah uh totally I definitely feel like um teachers should um especially like uh with all the teaching going on it leaves very little time unless you're doing it on your own for you know doing extensive reading and a lot of listening and stuff like that um now I want to talk specifically about uh reading because I feel like a lot of people are um they underestimate how powerful

uh reading is uh also there's also a part of me that thinks that you know people younger people not even like super young like people my age you know 30s or so they just don't really read at all um like you know hard cover books and stuff even in their native language so they don't develop this taste for just reading you know for pleasure and this is a huge uh loss um do you think that one can actually do let's say just listening you can you just do listening and you just ignore uh reading because

you don't like it is this still okay or do you need to do the reading um it depends on how far in language you want to get let me just back up and say I appreciate your comments about readers and people not reading as much as a writer now somebody who writes fiction I wish more people would buy my books and read them but you know that's that's my lament um because I I agree with you I don't think people read enough I have I have academic friends all over the country who are on my

Facebook page and so on and maybe they're busy with their research and so on I can't even get them to buy my nomal you know me I'm Bill Van Patton you know me buy my damn book and read it um but they don't because they're not reading fiction they're doing something else um so I I appreciate you're saying that um but let's look at a first language I'm going to give you a a a simple example passes and actives okay so an active sentence in English would be uh the cow kicked the horse you got

that in your mind what happened right now if I say the horse was kicked by the cow that's the exact same scene there was a cow that did some kicking and there was a horse horse that got kicked right so whether the cow kicked the horse or the horse kicked the cow it's the same scene one is an active sentence the cow kicked the horse and the other was a passive sentence the horse was kicked by the cow okay children learning English as a first language are pretty crappy with passes up until the age of

like seven or eight half the time when they hear passes they get it wrong like little kids at the preschool kids for example be giv puppets to act out like show me that the horse was kicked by the cow they think the horse did the kicking and they show the horse kicking in the cow so they're processing passives wrong they don't have um and then they get them sometime by the time they're in grade school you start to see a real differentiation between actives and passives they they know the difference what we seen with adults

in English in some research so let be me qualify that that is that you can take college educated and non-college educated adults and test them on passives and and you test two things when they hear a passive do they make mistakes in interpreting passives and the second thing is how quickly they process passive sens opposed to active senses and what the researches suggest pretty suggestive of is that college educated adults in English process passs faster than non- colge educated adults and they make fewer mistakes in interpreting passes because you can still make mistakes you hear

the house house was kicked by the horse was kicked by the cow um and if you're reading quick you know there's just particularly if the sentence a little bit longer whatever you might misinterpret the P that can happen to anybody right okay so these college educated people make fewer mistakes and process passes faster than the non-college educated people so Lewis what do you think is the difference between the college educated and non-college educated uh well a huge amount of debt first and then second is uh it depends on the country though I mean in France

it's just a different system but um yeah a lot of reading I suppose uh college educated people had to read a lot college educated people read that's what they do par excalon they read constantly they read in their English class they read in their history class they read in their business classes they read in their science classes they read in their philosophy classes you just cannot go to college and not read and um and some of them are in college because they're readers to begin with too so they also read fiction you know they they

um read all the novels in high school they had to read and they read all the short stories they teach me to read and so on um and a lot of non- colge educated people just either don't read or don't read as much so one of the fun so it's not that they have a formal education the college they just have been forced and or want to read more and lots of it so what that suggests to us is that in a first language reading is fundamental to developing the broadest ability with communication and language

is possible and Paul probably talked about this to you yesterday reading increases your vocabulary like nobody's business compared to just oral language um you can have one or two words to mean something but if you read a lot you'll find that there are five other words that can mean the same thing but you would never hear them because they tend to be more more in print than in spoken language so you develop more vocabulary um and you develop ability like and process more complex sentences and be and Beyond the basics of structural elements in language

you understand things like style and discourse how senses fit together uh what a formal tone is as opposed to an informal tone I mean just there's all kinds of things that happen to you through Reading that you don't get if you're just exposed to spoken language that's just that's just it's just to me it's so clear so if that's true for first language why wouldn't it be true for second language in fact it has to be true for second language has to be true so the more you read in a second language the more language

you're going to learn and the more ability with language the second language you're going to get in the long run that doesn't mean necessarily that you read from the get that you know you have to read from the first day let's say you want to learn Russian so I'm going to start reading Russian the first day that doesn't mean that just means in the course of your time frame in learning Russian the more you read the more you're going to learn russan the more you read you're going more German the more German you're going to

learn and so on that's what it means yeah definitely I feel like the in terms of vocabulary it definitely makes a big difference among other things but um uh in terms of just I just thought about this but is there a difference between reading fiction and reading non fiction because I read a lot of non-fiction but I never really got into fiction I suppose it's not that I don't like it but uh I don't know I just never got into it am I missing out here necessarily no I mean um there's uh no I don't

think so I don't think so I think you are as a writer I think you are because you're missing some great stories and reading for pleasure is it's like watching movies it's like to me fiction is just so much fun um and the way what writers do with language right that you don't get in non-fiction um so so in non-fiction n t 10 you're you're going to read um something like the sunrose in fiction you're not going to read the sunrose you're going to read something different that evokes the feeling of a sunrising so it

it's it to me when you don't read fiction you're you're missing how people use language to display things and do imagery that you just don't get a non-fiction but that doesn't necessarily impact your ability with language it just it's again that goes to style and tone and things I was talking about earlier but it's it's not going to impact your syntax and morphology or spelling or anything like that um that you don't read fiction um you just miss out on some fun stuff yeah know it's true I uh because I remember uh Dr Stephen crash

always talking about you know you need comprehensible input and it needs to be interesting and so if you only read non-fiction uh I tend to read obviously around you know my interests and uh it's like there are only so many books that you can uh read about Alzheimer's disease right it's always going to be the same thing and at some point it's not going to be interesting anymore whereas fiction there's no you know limits so maybe there is an argument to be made for the fact that you know there's more interesting content in fiction I

suppose yeah so talking about uh your writing so uh you're writing a lot of fiction nowadays can you talk a little bit a little bit more about this because I think it's a little bit unusual uh you were you worked in Academia and now you're an author so uh tell us about this yeah it was uh I I've I've always liked storytelling and when I was an academic I worked on um a t NOA in Spanish writing scripts and so on which is 52 episodes um of that series and then I did uh a movie

in Spanish and a movie in a sequel in French and excuse me that creative side it's always been there but never really did much with it and that was at Michigan State my last um position I was at where I thought I just want to get into fiction writing so I actually joined a local critique group and started working on some short stories and then what happened was um it was 2017 I believe 16 going on 17 I came I'm from California I came to California visit my sister and um she's older than I am

and she was looking get older and I thought oh my God you know she's getting older that means I'm getting older how many years I'm going to have left with my family and my sister and I don't want to be you know miles apart from her so I just basically packed up and move I just left my job at Michigan State moved to California started writing full-time so I'm going to write full-time and I still had one foot in the door that with second language stuff again I still do that but it's it's the minority

of my time the majority of my time has spent fiction writing and and um the the first thing I did was a book of short stories and then I wrote a novel called sidon's tale um siden is short for posidon the you know the king of the sea the ruler of the Seas the god of the seas Greek mythology and um I guess I did pretty well with that I W I won actually I won a m a semi- major award for that that book oh cool and I just kept writing and I just so

since 200 17 I've written published five novels three books of short stories I'm working on my sixth novel right now it's in the final stages editing and polishing and blah blah blah I'm working on a Nolla a Noel that's Spanish how do we say it Nolla I don't know how we say it in English you know it's a Nolla in English is a short novel like 3 30 40,000 words as opposed to a full length novel which is 70 to 880,000 words so we're going to Nolla now um in another book of short stories and

so it's just what I do and I write um siden tale is the the first novel I did was two stories in one um it's a story of a guy who's fleeing LEC Texas where I taught for a while um and he's on the back roads of Texas and he he's fleeing the highway patrol so he's on the back road so that he won't get caught on the highways and he almost runs over this old man on the side of the road and so he offers to give the old the old man a ride the

next town and so on and the old man claims to be Poseidon ruler of all the Seas and so they start dist trip together and this old man starts to tell his life story as though he were Poseidon so the chapters go back and forth between the the present which is about Jake and him fleeing loic and trying to get away from this higher Patrol man and the other chapters are this man telling him his life story as Poseidon um and so my latest no uh Noella the one I'm working right now has gone back

to Greek mythology I'm writing a novel about ganade the young boy who was abducted to Olympus by by Zeus um but in between those most of my fiction is just adult contemporary fiction where focus on family drama secrets that people have and how families unravel because of Secrets and I just I'm it's kind of like Tennessee Williams you know Eugene O'Neal what happens behind the closed doors kind of stuff right so that's what I do yeah this is uh really interesting I've always been interested in uh in how whether it be a fiction or non-fiction

how writers actually the way they work it seems like um so you said that you're about to publish your sixth book right my sixth novel yeah the six novel and so from an Outsiders perspective it seems like wow you know you've been at it for for years and it's only like six books but then it seems like authors have a like it takes a lot of time to write a book a high quality quality thing and so I'm curious as far as like uh what is the process like is it like the writing that takes

a long time or the I suppose the publisher also has to uh review the book and there's the whole review uh process what is process like yeah I mean you you draft um and if you're someone like me um you're part of critique groups people who are other writers who read your work you you share your work and they critique it and give you feedback oh I think you missed a plot Point here bill or you know or oh this scene doesn't seem very well motivated and you go back you go oh yeah you're right

you ditch it you know you let you get rid of it or you rewrite it or something so there's there's getting a getting something let's say a novel forget about short stories but a novel um is about 25 to 30% writing Drafting and about 70 to 75% rewriting revising and self-editing and then um if you add in actual editor's work once you once you get a manuscript a develop it if if you go through traditional publishing where you self-publish you still have you you need a developmental editor who's going to look at it with eye

toward what is the average reader how's this going to work and how's your plot structure they give you they give you more feedback on that kind of stuff um and then you do revisions as needed and then um so so that adds to that whole process of revision and rewriting um then you have copy editors just like you do if you're writing an article Journal like a non-fiction thing or a scientific paper um you have copy editors who go through line by line and oh you missed a comma here you know or oh you did

this or that's not the word you want to use there you know that kind of thing um and so it takes it takes all those steps just to get a manuscript ready for production and then then after that is when it goes to the designers and the book people the people design your cover and interior and all that kind of stuff it's and and I like all of that Pro the copy editing process to me is just that's just mechanical but I like all the process of writing from drafting to critiquing and working with other

writers to getting feedback from developmental editors and re I just I the whole entire process to me is just I love it I just it's great yeah this is fascinating um sounds so much different from like your you know normal office job I mean I'm a software developer it's uh it sounds so exotic in a sense uh I do have a few more questions about uh language learning um so first I want to talk about sort of a I guess taboo subject I suppose it's uh age and uh language learning because I do have some

people you know ask me questions about well you know I'm uh um I'm 60 or I'm 70 or can I learn a language or even worse I'm 40 and I uh doubt that I can learn a second language uh what's your opinion on this is it possible and if so to what uh up to what level is it possible to get really good when you're let's not say 40 but uh you know 60 70 80 yeah I mean language acquisition like anything is time on task um coupled with motivation again remember what I said earlier

about good enough like my French my French Learning is over I I'm not going to acquire much more French cuz I just don't care to um and I don't spend any time in French anymore so so I'm I'm I'm I'm in my good enough stage right so all language learning regardless of age is partly dictated by time on task how much time you have for it and then how much motivation how far you you really want to get and um and by time on task I don't mean you know sitting there with flash cards I

mean time on task in sense of exposure how much time do you have to be exposed and interact with the language with other speakers and so on so the later you start the less chance you have of being further along than somebody who started sooner than you because that's just less time you have exposure to the language period and too many people think about language learning language acquisition some kind of part-time thing only for for super Learners and we don't really quite know what drives those people um maybe you're one of those lisis I don't

know PE bu judge looks like he's one of those people just are really good and quick at acquiring languages and they're they're few and in between but they exist the vast majority of people just need lots of time on task but the problem is people tend to think of things in years like how many years it going to take me it's not so much years but it's hours um if you look at first language acquisition I always tell people because people think first language acquisition oh kids they learn language so easily BL actually they don't

kids spend a lot of time learning language and they grew lots of things where they're not native likee for a long time so if you look at the number of hours a child spends learning a first language by the time they get to school at the age of five five and a half they've already spent like 14 15,000 hours just learning language that's that's all they do because they're not you know they interact and that's that's their job their job is to grow up and learn language um and then they start school and they're still

learning language you know we did earlier that I you know I told you about the passives and so on so forth lots of things language they just keeps developing and so um by the time you you get the passives down you've got another how many you know now you're at 20 24,000 25,000 hours of language learning going on the adult who's 40 years old how long would it take them I mean what could they do to get 20,000 hours of really quality language learning going on it's it's so people tend to think in years oh

if I do this a little bit each day you know and then in a in four years I'll be fluent and it doesn't quite work that way for the average person just doesn't and then you get lied to by certain commercial language learning company say oh in 10 minutes a day you can speak like have a real conversation in Spanish and like well no actually you can't you know you can in 30 days you can learn a few phrases and learn how to say where's this and where's that and and when you go to Spain

but you can't really have a conversation with anybody because you really don't have language in your head yet um so people get lied to about that kind of stuff so whether you're start at 30 whether you start at 40 4 start 60 anybody can acquire language anybody can it's just time on task motivation exposure um and making sure you do the things that really going to help you get language as opposed to spending time doing things that are just in the long run not going to get you much language yeah this is great uh bill

is there anything that we did not uh talk about that you want to mention hey no you're driving this boat as they say um so you have the questions I I don't have anything else I can think of that I want to talk about we talked about language communication but people do age individual differences we talked we talked about so many things I don't think I have anything else to add um you don't have any last minute questions from me Louis yeah know I'll um I'm not sure I'll let the the viewers and the listeners

decide uh on YouTube there's um they're going to leave comments and I'm going to be answering these uh of course I'll uh put a a link to your website in the description of the video and uh you know wherever people are listening to this but uh this was really great I think people got a lot from this so thank you so much Bill I hope well thank you this has been fun