Learning in Context

Accountants are fond of the saying, "cash is king." There is no more critical a resource or indicator of fiscal health than the amount of hard cash a company has available to it. Cash is where the financial rubber hits the road. This seems like an obvious principle but given the financial state of many organizations we can see how its meaning is often lost on decision makers. All too often the original principal is lost to obscurity. Language acquisition is no exception.

In language acquisition, "context is king." Our linguistic rubber hits the road when we understand the messages we are inputting. Comprehension is more easily accomplished when there is a meaningful story (I frequently use that word in place of "context") within which messages are digested. Input, then, must be rooted in a meaningful background in order to be optimal for language acquisition.

Stories paint a vivid picture for us. They give us a full world in which something significant takes place. Absent this world, language is much more difficult to understand and pick up. Most learners assume that if words aren't used they will soon be forgotten. The real problem is the lack of a story.

Words are recalled when they are paired with a striking scene, instance of action, or a meaningful moment. Human memory is a bread crumb trail that is highly tailored to the individual. Once a piece of input has been internalized, recollection happens almost instantaneously. This is much more optimal than the traditional language student's recall mechanisms: grammatical deconstruction & reconstruction (reverse engineering) and rote memorization.

While having a story is preferred to none, stories selected by the learner are the ideal. I love Hamlet but many others could care less about it. While I enjoy Hamlet I do not care much for Othello. Central is your interest level in the story. If you are not engaged in the story then using it to acquire language is going to be no more helpful than relying on pure memorization.

Stories should meet two primary criteria to be most useful for language acquisition purposes:

(1) We must be interested in the subject matter.

(2) We must be able to basically understand the story.

The first point is no breakthrough discovery. If I don't really care for Othello then there is no reason to torture myself by trying to utilize it to learn new words and phrases. They are just as likely to be found in Hamlet, a Tom Clancy novel or the comic pages for that matter.

The second point – the ability to basically understand the story – is the caveat. Even an interesting story is useless unless it can be understood at some level. It is the line between futility, a fighting chance, and holding your own. Learners should be aware of how much of the story they are really capable of understanding.

"Futility" is when you read the text and have to look up every other word. Let's consider this to be cases when more than 50% of the text is unknown words. Such reading is incredibly slow and effortful. I would argue that even reading with the assistance of electronic/computerized dictionaries (fast lookups) is futile because you would still spend the majority of your time assembling meaning in a piecemeal fashion.

A "fighting chance" is when we have moved out of the realm of futility. In this case there are likely sentences we can comprehend but they are often in between sentences we do not. The amount of lookup is lessened but still takes up a noticeable amount of time. Again, computerized lookup speeds the process but there is still a good deal of mental exercise to go through. If the overall text length can be minimized then there is a better chance of having a reasonably pleasurable, low stress experience.

"Holding our own" is the ideal state. Percentages are arguable, but anywhere from 75-90% or more of the text should be known words. Lookup becomes an infrequent occurrence as we should be able to infer meaning from – that's right – the context, rather than having to look it up. This is the sweet spot of language acquisition. Highly comprehensible, interesting reading materials are a GOLD MINE of language learning.

One very practical issue is how students, particularly beginners, should study in context. There are three types of input that can be utilized when studying with stories:

(1) Modified Input (graded readers)

(2) Pure Input (native materials)

(3) Measured Input (limited length native materials)

Graded readers are a well known literacy development tool. They are content that has been deliberately constructed to match a certain reading level in terms of vocabulary, recognizable patterns, length, etc. Obviously, less demanding material is quite valuable for beginning learners because they are not ready to tackle large tracts of unknown vocabulary and patterns. Their drawback is availability and diversity of content.

Some would argue that any deliberately simplified content is a less than ideal study resource because it is too far outside the norm of the living language, but as long as the reader finds it interesting the content will still be useful regardless of whether it is simplified or not.

Children's books could be seen as a quite natural starting point in language studies but in fact they are far from ideal for adult readers. The stories are juvenile and not of much interest to adults and are written so they may be comprehended by individuals with not only limited language skills but little common sense and experience (i.e., children). This makes it difficult for adults to relate to the stories and draw the appropriate inferences. Adult learners should read adult things.

(An exception would be young adult reading materials. Starting from 5^th or 6^th grade levels the material starts to become engaging for even fully grown adults. Of course by this stage readers are working with much more voluminous content like short novels so the reading itself is not trivial.)

The next type of input is pure input, which is actual media made for native, adult speakers of the language. There is no soft-pedaling of the language here; it is real, natural (mistakes and all) and speedy. Real stuff is good. It's not only good, it's very good. The vast majority of our "study" time (at least 80%) should be spent with real materials. At first the going will be slow but the more time that is invested the sooner results will appear.

We learn the language by reading and listening to the actual language. Sterilized versions can be of some use but they are no substitute for the genuine article. Many beginning students resist real materials because they feel they can't be comprehended. Instead, they rely on crutches like materials written for foreigners learning the language, which are very artificial (think unrealistic) and largely uninteresting. What learners need is exposure to interesting content on a daily basis.

Measured input is my answer to the claim that native materials are too difficult for beginners. The secret is text length. When our collective ability in a language consists of 100 words and a handful of simple patterns then digesting lengthy prose is going to be very time consuming, to say the least. To make things easier we need to cut the fat.

I think we could probably term this as "sentence mining" but for me that connotes a lack of story. Picking out sentences at random, translating them, and then importing them into a flash card system is an exercise that hardly seems appealing. It is better to find a source where the "story" is limited to just one, two, or a handful of sentences or phrases, read them repeatedly and frequently, and gradually ramp up the difficulty. Great sources to start with would be:

• Commercials
  
• Weather reports
  
• Songs
  
• Advertisements
  
• Personal Pages
  
• Help Wanted Ads
  
• Television Schedules
  
• Twitter
  
• Online Video Sites
  
• Horoscopes
  
• Manuals
  
• Diagrams
  
• Charts
  
• Train/Plane Schedules
  
• Photograph Captions
  
• Newspaper Headlines

Limited length is not the only helpful feature of such sources. Illustrations, pictures, photographs, sound, and a shared sense of background understanding (i.e., when you read the weather report you know what to expect) all aid in increasing comprehensibility. Measured input is an ideal bridge to pure input of unlimited length.

Learning by working with real materials in context is probably the most useful tool a language learner has at their disposal. Everything should have a story, some substance to it. Your individual sense of what does and does not stimulate you is the gauge to measure content's usefulness. If you are curious about it and motivated to know more, use it. If not, don't bother.

Studying in context means inputting materials that have a background, meaning and/or purpose that interests you. Favor materials that have these characteristics and spend as little time as possible with ones deliberately constructed for foreign learners. If you apply this simple rule consistently to your language studies you will be well on the way to fluency.