#1: Why practising a second language is like building Lego, or should be

Polter Geist
Nov 5 · 6 min read

(and it’s not because one misstep can lead to screams of pain)

See, this guy gets it!

“I need a 2x1 with a hole in the side. Might have to use a couple of these 1x1s instead, but they’re the wrong colour and shape. Maybe I can cover them with that black four by four piece that I saw somewhere two minutes ago, it must be here somewhere.”

The above is something like the thought process that would run through my mind when I would play with my favourite toy — Lego — when I was a kid. I had a big box of jumbled up Lego, which was a combination of old hand-me-down bricks from the 90s and newer parts added in from eagerly acquired birthday presents (which my Mum recently sold while I was away at University…). The pieces in my collection offered up endless building combinations, limited only by my imagination. But what has this got to do with languages?

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Language teaching in many countries is beholden to a despotic overlord I call the “treadmill of topics”. Anyone who wanted to fall asleep in French at school will know what I mean: two weeks on “my classroom”, another two weeks on “around town”, trying to convince both yourself and your teacher that your essay on “my daily routine” is in the least bit interesting, etc. I’m currently working in my second year as an English language assistant, (I did this for my year abroad in France a few years ago, and now for a gap year in Spain). I have therefore become reacquainted with this somewhat frustrating system. In my view it has five distinct problems:

  • It’s dull
  • It doesn’t encourage natural speech syntax
  • The vocabulary is artificially constricted and often irrelevant to practical use
  • Vocabulary retention is contingent upon consistent reuse, which is less likely in a system that cycles through one topic at a time.
  • Stronger language students will build up a good level regardless, and can then ‘transition’ to more natural-style speech, but weaker students never reach the level to make this jump

This system is definitely not without merit: it offers a framework to gradually introduce grammar points, it’s structured, and teachers know it from having gone through the same thing. It sometimes makes my life easier by giving me a predefined curriculum around which to build my lesson plans. But the limitations of this system — or at least a too-close adherence to it — in helping language learners reach their potential were recently drawn into sharp relief for me: I was beginning a lesson on sports for some younger pupils, but they struggled to answer the question “How are you?”. They have been learning English for 4 years.

— — —

As a kid I thought I was going to be a scientist because of how insanely interesting I found reading about space or atoms. It’s only when I realised how quantitative the practise of science is, that I realised that humanities and languages were more my forte. Similarly, although there is much evidence to suggest that Lego builds motor function, shape and space in children, this is not what I got out of it. For me, building Lego is more like the process of speaking a second language. You conceive your goal, analyse the situation in front of you, choose and arrange the most useful resources in your inventory, and find a way to fit them together to create a stylistically and functionally viable solution. All of these creative problem-solving processes are also employed when speaking in a second language.

This is demonstrated by a maxim that language teachers often tell their students: try and think of a way to say it using what you do know, rather than asking me/Google for translations of words that you don’t. In the age of instant translation, the utility of instant translation risks becoming a crutch, and you don’t develop this crucial ability to improvise using limited resources. This, to me, is the linguistic equivalent of having access to highly specialised Lego sets that are only designed to build one thing (e.g. the Death Star) but not being able to draw on the generic pieces, the bricks-and mortar, um, bricks, that can be redeployed in a new, creative ways. There is a whole debate about whether Lego has declined in this way, which is interesting in itself, but I don’t want to get into it here.

Another version of this problem I’ve encountered is how my kids are able to come up with sometimes impressive predefined responses to certain situations, but more fluent communication tends to be hampered by their over-reliance on rote memorisation of (often irrelevant) vocabulary. One thing I have found whenever entering a second-language environment is that the kinds of words you quickly find yourself needing are often not the kind that you learn following a typical, topic treadmill language curriculum. The real world can’t be neatly categorised into discrete modules. Clearly, full immersion in a real linguistic environment is impossible in a language classroom, but there is a failure to teach language students connective words and core verbs that would allow them to construct any number of sentences. They are left inflexible and overspecialised, bringing us back to my Death Star analogy. It took a whole year of German before I was taught how to say “because”, and I remember in one French class many years ago a teacher was impressed when I asked, in relation to a pile of books, “Where should I put them?” This is exactly the kind of useful sentence that language learners aren’t given the resources to construct until very late in the game. If you can list your morning routine and tell me what colour your own hair is but you can’t draw upon words like “how” or “went”, or even “instead of” or “whatever”, then the kind of sentence you can build is always going to be limited.

In my personal experience having a small reservoir of useful generic words allows you to talk about pretty much anything, and having started Spanish less than a year ago, I’ve learned enough words to have authentic, coherent, albeit incredibly basic conversations, even though my vocabulary is probably substantially smaller than my pupils’ vocabularies in English (not to blow my own trumpet). Given my experience with languages this makes me feel that this ability to discern and learn the words that are most useful and flexible may be one of the reasons that learning a third or fourth language is easier: you know how to learn. The point here is not me boasting that I’m better at languages than the majority of Spanish 12-years olds, but that a teaching system more focused on flexibility, utility and conversation, and teaching people how to learn (rather than just teaching them things) could encourage this Lego-style creativity. It’s like that old proverb: give a man a duck and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to duck and he’ll avoid walking into a bar for the rest of his life!

— — —

I decided to write this blog post a few weeks ago after a brainwave, crystallised by my being in the strange position of teaching kids whose first language I barely speak myself. I’m no developmental psychologist, but I wasn’t surprised to learn after a cursory google that there is even some evidence that playing with Lego can improve children’s language skills. In one article from Parenting Science, they argue that play like this encourages “divergent” problem-solving in children, that is to say solving problems with numerous or infinite outcomes, in contrast to “convergent” problem-solving, which has only one fixed outcome.

This corresponds exactly to what I outline above: “convergent” language use seems to be more common amongst the kids I’ve taught, who feel most comfortable when given a defined topic with a limited range of set answers. If the questions escapes these boundaries, they often freeze up, start speaking in Spanish to explain, or lean on translators (Google, the class teacher, their more fluent friends). It is however the flexible, creative, deployment of language via “divergent” problem-solving means that, in my opinion, language instruction should aspire to teach. How to encourage this approach amongst my kids is another question entirely. If only my Mum hadn’t sold my Lego….

Polter Geist

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