17

How do you get a ‘feel’ for a second

language?

I was once teaching a group of fairly advanced students and the ‘structure of the day’ was
gradable vs ungradable adjectives (of the type angry vs furious, hungry vs starving, cold vs
freezing, etc.) and, specifically, the intensifying adverbs (extremely vs absolutely) that they
collocate with. Not sure either of my ability to establish the difference nor of their existing
knowledge of it, I decided to test the students first, and asked them to decide which intensifier
(extremely or absolutely) went best with each of a list of adjectives, some gradable, some not.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, when I checked the task, most of the students had most of the
answers correct. ‘Starving?’ ‘Absolutely’. ‘Hot?’ ‘Extremely’, etc. ‘How were you able to do that?’
I asked at one point, fishing for the rule. Whereupon one student answered: ‘It just feels right.’

‘Great,’ I said, ‘you just saved me the trouble of having to teach you something!’

It just feels right: isn’t this, after all, the ideal state we want our learners to be in? To have the
gut feeling that it’s not ‘How long are you living here?’ but ‘How long have you been living here?’
and not ‘I like too much the football’ but ‘I like football very much’ – irrespective of their capacity
to state the rule. This is what the Germans call Sprachgefühl – literally ‘language-feel’: a native-
like intuition of what is right.

So, how do you get it? Proponents of the Direct Method would argue that the kind of native-like
intuitions that constitute ‘feel’ can be acquired only in a monolingual learning environment ,
analogous to the situation of first language acquisition. Use of translation or any cross-linguistic
comparison is therefore proscribed. As Berltiz (1911: 3) put it: ‘He who is studying a foreign
language by means of translation neither gets hold of its spirit nor becomes accustomed to
think in it.’ Otto Jespersen (1904: 48) expressed it more vividly: ‘The first condition for good
instruction in foreign languages would seem to be to give the pupil as much as possible to do
with and in the foreign language; he must be steeped in it … he must be ducked down in it and
get to feel as if he were in his own element, so that he may at last disport himself in it as an
able swimmer.’ Total immersion takes this ‘deep end’ metaphor to its logical conclusion.

In the same tradition, but coming from a humanist point of view, Caleb Gattegno (1972)
believed that – in order to get a feel for the target language – no amount of telling or of
repeating or of memorizing would work. Instead, learners must develop their own ‘inner criteria’
for correctness. In order to do this, they would need to access ‘the spirit of the language’. And
this spirit was to be found in its words – not the ‘big’ lexical words, but the small, functional
words that – in English at least – carry the burden of its grammar:

Since it is not possible to resort to a one-to-one correspondence, the only way open is to reach
the area of meaning that the words cover, and find in oneself whether this is a new experience
which yields something of the spirit of the language, or whether there is an equivalent
experience in one’s own language but expressed differently.

In the Silent Way, then, learners engage with a relatively limited range of language items,
initially, but with a great deal of concentration. Concentration is facilitated through the use of
such tactile devices as Cuisenaire rods.

Subsequently, Krashen (e.g. 1981: 1) would argue that a ‘feel for grammaticality’ cannot be
learned; it can only be acquired. In much the same spirit as Jespersen, he argued that a feel
for language can be internalized only through ‘meaningful interaction in the target language’. And
the sole pre-requisite for meaningful interaction is exposure to quantities of ‘comprehensible
input’.

Researchers in the cognitive tradition would disagree. What I am calling ‘feel’, they would call
‘implicit knowledge’, defined (by Ellis,1997: 111) as knowledge that ‘is intuitive, in the sense that
the learner is unlikely to be aware of having ever learned it and is probably unaware of its
existence’. But the fact that the learner isn’t aware of it now doesn’t mean to say that the
learner wasn’t aware of it once. Contrary to Krashen’s claim that explicit instruction and
intentional learning play no role in language acquisition, scholars such as Skehan (1998) cite
evidence that shows that conscious learning of rules, or intentional memorization of examples,
can – over time – ‘sediment’ into implicit knowledge. Or ‘feel’.

One way this happens may be through the accumulation of ‘episodic instances’. As Dörnyei
(2009: 157) explains it, ‘initially, a person performs an action following explicit rules. However,
on every subsequent occasion that the person is engaged in performing the particular skill, a
new memory trace is formed corresponding to the action executed, and thus practice leads to
the storage of an increasing number of these memorized instances.’ The original ‘algorithm’ that
generated the behaviour is forgotten, to be replaced by these stored episodic instances. In
language learning terms, we don’t remember the rule; we remember the examples that the rule
generated. We ‘feel’ that something is correct because it matches this mental database.

Of course, this doesn’t deny the fact that incidental exposure also feeds into this database.
Researchers into brain function have simulated the way that repeated firings across the mental
network serve to strengthen neural pathways, resulting in behaviours that are consistent with
rule learning, but in which conscious attention to rules played no part. But such models assume
fairly massive amounts of exposure – amounts that most learners don’t experience.

Moreover, the mental network for second language learning is not a blank slate, but is already
massively reticulated with well-entrenched pathways derived from exposure to – and use of –
the L1. As Dörnyei (ibid.: 168) concludes, ‘When we look at SLA, the processes that seem to
work so effectively and effortlessly for infants ... do not seem to exist, or if they do, they have a
rather limited impact.’

A further problem with implicit knowledge is that, if the knowledge is wrong, it is much more
difficult to access, root out, and re-configure than is explicit knowledge. We all know learners
who stubbornly insist that something is correct, when it is not. They may even be convinced that
they have heard the erroneous form before. Dick Schmidt, learning Portuguese in Brazil (as
described in Schmidt and Frota, 1986: 304), was convinced that the word for wife was marida
(by analogy with marido, or husband; the correct word for wife is in fact esposa or mulher).
When this error was brought to his attention, he was ‘astounded’. As he wrote in his journal, ‘I
have the strongest feeling, in fact I am ready to insist that I have never heard the word esposa,
but I have heard marida many times.’ Despite having been corrected, he continued to use
marida, and ten weeks later, after further corrections, he wrote: ‘I … cannot shake the feeling
that I didn’t make it up’ (ibid.: 305). Eventually, the correct form asserts itself, but, as Schmidt
notes, ‘Five months to figure out such a simple thing!’ (ibid.: 305).

So much for feel!

Questions for discussion

1. Do you have a ‘feel’ for a second language? If so, how did you get it?
2. Is it simply a matter of practice?

3. Some grammar you have to learn; some you can only get by ‘feel’. Is this true? Can you think
of examples?

4. Do you think translation or any reference to the learner’s first language will inhibit the
development of ‘feel’?

5. How do you accumulate a ‘mental database’ of stored examples?

6. What’s the best way of ‘undoing’ a learner’s mistaken intuitions?

7. Can learners eventually forget the rules they once learned, and function solely on ‘feel’?

8. Is the ‘spirit of the language’ in its words, its pronunciation, its syntax – or its cultural
associations?

References
Berlitz, M. (1911) Method for Teaching Modern Languages, English Part: First Book, Berlin:
Siegfried Cronbach.

Dörnyei, Z. (2009) The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Ellis, R. (1997) SLA Research and Language Teaching, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gattegno, C. (1972) Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way (2nd ed.), NY:
Educational Solutions.

Jespersen, O. (1904, 1952) How to Teach a Foreign Language, London: George Allen &
Unwin.

Krashen, S. (1981) Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, Oxford:
Pergamon.

Schmidt. R. and Frota, S. (1986) ‘Developing basic conversational ability in a second language:
A case study of an adult learner’, in Day, R. (ed.) Talking to learn: Conversation in a second
language, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Skehan, P. (1998) A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning, Oxford: Oxford University

Press.
To see how readers responded to this topic online, go to

http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/f-is-for-feel/