Have We Gotten Second Language Learning All Wrong Until Now?
Have we forgotten that language is a social phenomenon?
Reading is a mind-blowing phenomenon when you stop and think about it. Which is something we rarely do, I’ll be the first to admit. But consider this: when we read, we actually have a conversation with a person who’s incalculably far away from us, in space, in time, or both. The person might be living or dead. And the person might not even speak our native language.
The words of Virgil or Shakespeare have come down to us over hundreds of years, thousands of years, serving as a substrate to convey their thoughts into our minds.
Reading is both a creative process and a passive process. When we read, we imagine and create; but also when we read, we allow the writer to take the lead.
How many of us sign onto a site like Medium and focus our minds and hearts on the meat and potatoes of the articles we read without a second thought to the fact that this miraculous invention of the human species, reading, an invention that we alone understand, allows us to intimately step inside the mind of another human being? It’s as if we get to take a stroll through the inner workings of their conscious stream for a little while.
The 16th-Century Italian Philosopher, Nicollo Machiavelli, once said about reading in a letter to a friend:
“I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me; and for four hours I feel not a drop of boredom, think nothing of my cares, am fearless of poverty, unrattled by death; I transfer all of myself into them.”
But no matter how marvelous reading is, it’s only half of the story of how humans use language. The other half is speaking and actually interacting with other people somewhere along the time-space continuum.
We evolved to understand language so we could communicate with one another and master our environments, not idly read books. Even though reading is a wonderful activity (I love it), it’s not the primary driver of the evolution of language.
In other words, reading alone isn’t even enough to keep a language alive, let alone to learn it like a pro.
Of Living and Dead Languages
Once upon a time, Latin was the language that ruled the world. And the reason that it no longer does is that it proved painfully difficult for new learners to speak, even though it remained the dominant written language in Europe for centuries thereafter.
Languages live and die by their learnability. And sometimes, learning a language is just too much of a hassle, especially if it’s a second language, regardless of the benefits (and there are many).
All of this makes me wonder, have we gotten language-learning wrong all along? I think we have. And there’s some science that’s not only starting allude to this fact but also point us in the right direction.
I’ll give our ancestors a bit of kudos, here, they tried hard with the tools they had. For thousands of years, all they had was textbooks and a tutor if you were rich enough. I’m sure that they, like us, wished that we could just download a new language like Keanu Reeves learned Kung Fu in The Matrix.
While that point is a long, long way off, the next step in the evolution of language learning is right on the horizon and it just might take us back to our roots.
Enter science.
Enter virtual reality social brain learning.
VR Social Brain Learning
In a published work titled The Social Brain of Language: Grounding Second Language Learning in Social Interaction, researchers Ping Li and Hyeonjeong Jeong put forth a new idea: that all of these components must be complemented with a social atmosphere.
This is how we make our language learning matter to our brains.
In the study, the authors theorized — and later demonstrated with neuroimaging — that when we learn things in a social setting, more areas of the brain are activated.
Rather than the workout in memory we get by simply memorizing things and reciting them again later (boring!), when we interact with other people and objects in the real world as we learn our new language, our sensorimotor and emotional systems become engaged by the learning process.
When we learned our first languages as kids, we learned in a spatio-temporal environment.
Our parents showed us an apple and said, “an apple,” and we could then grab this strange object; we could touch it, feel it, appreciate its redness or its greenness; and we could recite the word back while utilizing our entire body and mind to comprehend it.
Apple.
This made it real for us. Not just another abstraction in the theoretical world of the mind.
The traditional approaches to language learning focused mainly on paired associations, grammar drills, classrooms, and memory, whereas social brain learning focused on social interaction with other learners within the language, whole embodiment (immersion) in the learning context, and the immediate feedback from the sensory/motor systems in the brain.
For centuries, we’ve relied on showing ourselves or others a word in our first language and a word in the language we’re trying to learn; “manzana” and “apple,” for instance, hoping that if we repeat the process enough times, our brains will solidify the link.
This highly rigorous process feels so remote! Let’s be honest, it’s boring.
Not to mention, it’s less effective than learning entirely in the second language as if you were an infant again.
Language Networks in the Brain
Stop and think of the neural network we’ve established in our first languages as a big blockchain of connections. As we get older, this becomes more and more massive, unwieldy, and we have to file new information away in the network at the expense of the old.
Learning two separate words for every object and context we might encounter in life pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with one network. And that’s what we do when we learn a second language through translation into our first.
But what if we could build a completely new network from scratch?
Researchers put to the test what would happen if learners used “body-specific” responses during language learning, such as touching things in virtual reality. Imagine being able to put a headset on and the screen inside will show you a complete kitchen where you can physically reach out your hand and select the objects being taught to you?
Well, it appears, that changes the game entirely.
For children and adults alike, VR learning has the potential to radically transform the way we augment a second language and build a new language network in our brains from scratch.
As the researchers note:
In terms of the SL2 framework, VR has the promise of providing a context of learning for children and adults on equal footing, and in particular, it simulates “situated learning”, a condition whereby learning takes place through real-world experiences and visuospatial analyses of the learning environment, experiences and analyses that are often absent in a typical classroom
…and…
VR is an excellent example of the power of today’s technology-based learning, and it urges us to study how students can take advantage of rapidly developing technologies for better learning outcomes. We need to pay attention to the specific key features that support VR learning (e.g., immersive experience, spatial navigation, and user interactivity), the individual differences therein (e.g., cognitive characteristics of the learner including memory and motivation), and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms (e.g., sensorimotor integration) that enable VR as an effective tool.
And there are a few startups already employing this to try to drive learner success. Fluent in 3 Months, Immerse, and Unimersiv, just to name a few, are all companies that are utilizing this approach right now, developing new software that’s exciting and looks to revolutionize how we learn languages.
In the Unimersiv product called Language Room, available for Gear VR, users are taken into a virtual reality world where they encounter other users represented by the flag of the nation they’re from (and the language they speak). While it’s just in the beginning phases, I have to say, I’m filled with excitement at the thought of the possibilities this opens up.
Currently, apps like Tandem allow you to write messages back and forth with a native speaker (I highly suggest giving this app a try, it’ll take your learning to the next level).
This is awesome and can help you tremendously step up your second-language game being able to talk with native speakers.
But implementing the spatio-temporal aspect to the learning seems, according to the research, like it may be the thing that will drive our second language learning into a completely new paradigm.
For now, until that technology comes, do what you can to implement whatever you’re learning into your actual life. Begin using the new words you’re using every single day, as you grab objects or cook or clean your home. This is how we make our brains signify our new words we learn as “useful” to us and thus we’ll have an easier time remembering them.
