Chapter 08: Keep Motivated and Work Hard PDF

## Chapter 08: Keep Motivated and Work Hard ### How Long Does It Take To Learn Another Language? The Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State in the United States rates the languages they teach based on the difficulty their students have had over the years in mastering them. Group 1 is...

## Chapter 08: Keep Motivated and Work Hard ### How Long Does It Take To Learn Another Language? The Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State in the United States rates the languages they teach based on the difficulty their students have had over the years in mastering them. Group 1 is "easiest", Group 4 the "hardest". On average, a person learning a difficult language will take more time to reach the same level of proficiency as a person learning an easy language. "FSI researchers studied the performance of all their students during a three-year period, noting the ratings they received after various periods of training." These figures are based on high quality, intensive instruction of around 30 hours per week. The information about what can be achieved in certain time spans provides a rough indication of whether the goals of a course are realistic or need to be changed, or whether extra time needs to be found through study outside of regular class time. ### Table 8.1: Difficulty Ratings of Languages for Native-Speakers of English | Group 1 (The easiest) | Group 2 | Group 3 | Group 4 (The hardest) | |---|---|---|---| | French | Bulgarian | Amharic | Arabic | | German | Burmese | Cambodian | Chinese | | Indonesian | Greek | Czech | Japanese | | Italian | Hindi | Finnish | Korean | | Portuguese | Persian | Hebrew | | | Romanian | Urdu | Hungarian | | | Spanish | | Lao | | | Swahili | | Polish | | | | | Russian | | | | | Serbo-Croatian | | | | | Thai | | | | | Turkish | | | | | Vietnamese | | ### Table 8.2: Language Mastery Ratings for Social and Business Purposes 1. Elementary Proficiency: The person is able to satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements. 2. Limited Working Proficiency: The person is able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements. 3. Minimum Professional Proficiency: The person can speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics. 4. Full Professional Proficiency: The person uses the language fluently and accurately on all levels normally relevant to professional needs. 5. Native or Bilingual Proficiency: The person has speaking proficiency equivalent to that of an educated native speaker. So, if a native speaker of English wants to learn a hard language like Arabic to a level of limited working proficiency in an intensive course, it is likely to take that learner around 24 weeks to reach that level. ### Table 8.3: Learning Rates for "Easy" and "Hard" Languages | "Easy" Languages | "Hard" languages | |---|---| | Proficiency ratings of FSI students speaking a Group 1 language after specified periods of training | Proficiency ratings of FSI students speaking a group 2-4 language after specified periods of training | | Training period | Rating | Training period | Rating | | 8 weeks (240 hours) | 1/1+ | 12 weeks (360 hours) | 1/1+ | | 16 weeks (480 hours) | 2 | 24 weeks (720 hours) | 1+/2 | | 24 weeks (720 hours) | 2+ | 44 weeks (1320 hours) | 2/2+/3 | These figures are for native speakers of English learning another language. It is probably true that the information in the tables also works the other way, that is, because Japanese is classified as a hard language for native speakers of English, it is also likely that English will be a hard language for native speakers of Japanese, and an easy language for native speakers of Swedish. ### Factors Influencing Difficulty It is interesting to think of the reasons for the different levels of difficulty of different languages for native speakers of other languages. - **Writing System:** Many of the languages in groups 3 and 4 in Table 8.1 use a writing system that is unlike the English alphabet. Some of these writing systems like those of Korean and Thai use an alphabet which should make them easier to learn than Chinese or Japanese which make use of symbols for whole words. - **Tonal Languages:** Vietnamese and Mandarin use tones, such as a low tone, a high tone, a falling tone, or a rising tone, and each word has to be said with the appropriate tone. - **Stress-timed vs. Syllable-timed**: English is a stress-timed language with roughly equal times between stresses. Indonesian is a syllable timed language with roughly equal time given to each syllable. - **Historical Relationship:** English is closely related to Swedish, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish. These languages share a lot of similar vocabulary which we call cognates and these cognates make the learning of vocabulary much easier. - **Borrowed Vocabulary:** Because of the global influence of English, a lot of English words are being borrowed by speakers of other languages. These borrowings often result in changes to the form of the words but they are usually recognisable. - **Word Building System:** The word building system can differ greatly from language to language. Like French, Latin and Greek, English uses prefixes, stems and suffixes in many of its words. - **Grammatical Differences:** English has to deal with the tense system of English (past tense and present tense), the use of singular and plural, countable and uncountable nouns, and English articles (a and the). ### How Can A Learning Be Motivated? - **Talk to Other Learners:** Talk to other learners who have been successful in learning the language and get advice from them about what made them successful and what they found useful in their learning. - **Set Short-Term Goals:** Break it down into short-term goals. An obvious short-term goal is to decide to learn a certain number of words each week, for example, 20 words a week. Over the period of the year this adds up to 1000 words which is around the learning rate of native speakers of English. When doing this learning, remember to apply the guidelines described in Chapter 5 on deliberate learning using word cards. - **Make Learning Relevant:** The language items that you learn should be clearly relevant to you, and you need to give some thought about the situations in which you want to use the language so that you can make sure that all of these situations are covered in your learning. Table 8.4 contains a list of common and useful situations that you might wish to consider. - **Learn About How To Learn:** There is an enormous amount of research on learning including language learning, and the purpose of this book is to explain some of the findings of this research in a practical way. - **Take Responsibility For Your Own Learning:** Good learners take responsibility for their own learning and are not completely reliant on teachers to organise their learning for them. This is called learner autonomy. ### Note 8.1: What Are The Most Important Principles of Language Learning? 1. Work out what your needs are and learn what is most useful for you, giving particular attention to items which occur frequently in the language. 2. Balance your learning across the four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning, and fluency development. 3. Apply conditions that help learning, particularly spaced repetition, retrieval, varied meetings and varied use, elaboration, and deliberate attention, particularly by using effective language learning activities. 4. Keep motivated and work hard by setting short-term goals, doing something to learn the language every day, learning useful things, learning about learning, learning about the language, and developing a specialist interest. 5. Spend time on task, spending a lot of time using the language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) that you need to learn. 6. Avoid interference by separating items which are closely related in meaning such as near synonyms, opposites, and members of a lexical set 7. Take responsibility for your own learning by learning how to learn, by setting clear manageable goals, and by monitoring your learning. 8. Take every possibility to use and practice what you know. Although these opportunities may be limited outside the classroom, the Internet now provides a wealth of such opportunities. In addition, the relative ease of foreign travel also makes it possible to visit countries where the language you are learning is spoken, and if you prepare for such experiences carefully you can gain an enormous amount from them. Several researchers have suggested principles for language learning (Ellis, 2005; Krahnke and Christison, 1983; Nation and Macalister, 2009) and the different suggestions at least partly agree with each other. ### The Nature Of Language Learning a language is an interesting activity in its own right. It is useful to observe the principles that work when learning a language, and it is also interesting to learn about the nature of language and the particular language you are learning, and to learn how the language is used in relation to the customs of the users of the language. Focuses of attention can include the following-language families (What language family does the foreign language fit into? What are other languages in this family? How are these languages related historically?), word building (Does the language make use of prefixes and suffixes? What are the most common ones? Do dictionaries contain an analysis of word parts for each word?), classifiers (Does the language make use of classifiers? What are the more general purpose classifiers?), What do people say and do in certain common cultural practices such as eating, meeting and leaving, giving thanks, refusing an offer, offering a gift and receiving a gift? This learning about language can be done through the L1, at least at the beginning of language learning. Its goal is to develop knowledge that will make deliberate language learning more analytical and effective. ### Activity 8.1: Issue Logs An issue log is a record of data gathered from a wide range of sources over a sustained period of time. For example, if the topic chosen by an individual is marriage customs in a particular culture, then data can be gathered about their history, current practice, and people's attitudes to marriage. Data can be gathered through reading books, articles and newspaper reports, by listening to news broadcasts, by observing marriage ceremonies, and by interviewing people. Because the primary goal of an issue log is to provide opportunities for language use and language learning, data-gathering, analysis and writing up or orally recording the data should continue over several months or years. Ideally, the data-gatherer should report on the topic on a regular basis to other learners and to the teacher so that there is an opportunity for spoken interaction and repetition of the language features involved. However, an issue log can also just be an individual activity. By focusing on a narrow topic area, the vocabulary load of the topic-related listening and reading input is greatly reduced (by at least 50%) compared with focusing on a varied range of topics. In addition, background knowledge of the topic is quickly built up, making it easier to deal with the input material and to gain large quantities of understandable input. ### How To Work Hard In The Language? Learning another language requires a lot of learning (several thousand words as well as the grammar of the language) and a lot of practice (at least hundreds of hours). Although the task is a large one, it is manageable as long as you keep working at it in a persistent way. When the task is broken down into daily and weekly goals, it does not seem so overwhelming. For example, Note 8.2 indicates how much time should be spent reading in order to have a good chance of increasing your vocabulary size in a substantial way. Such amounts of reading will also have a positive effect on grammatical knowledge and reading skill. ### Note 8.2: How Much Reading Do You Need To Do? Is it possible to read enough to have a chance of learning most of the words you need to know? Table 8.5 gives approximate figures for the amount of text that needs to be read to meet most words at each 1000 word family level enough times (around 12) to have a chance of learning them. It assumes a moderate reading speed of 150 words per minute. Table 8.5 provides not only weekly time requirements, but also daily (5 days a week) time requirements. ### Table 8.5: Amount of Reading Input and Time Needed to Learn Each of the Most Frequent Nine 1,000 Word Families in English | 1000 Word List Level | Amount to Read | Time Needed for Reading Per Week (Per Day) at a Reading Speed of 150 Words Per Minute | |---|---|---| | 2nd 1,000 | 200,000 words | 33 minutes (7 minutes per day) | | 3rd 1,000 | 300,000 words | 50 minutes (10 minutes per day)| | 4th 1,000 | 500,000 words | 1 hour 23 minutes (17 minutes per day)| | 5th 1,000 | 1,000,000 words | 2 hours 47 minutes (33 minutes per day) | | 6th 1,000 | 1,500,000 words | 4 hours 10 minutes (50 minutes per day) | | 7th 1,000 | 2,000,000 words | 5 hours 33 minutes (1 hour 7 minutes per day) | | 8th 1,000 | 2,500,000 words | 6 hours 57 minutes (1 hour 23 minutes per day) | | 9th 1,000 | 3,000,000 words | 8 hours 20 minutes (1 hour 40 minutes per day) | **Note:** The per week figure is based on forty weeks, the daily rate is based on 5 days a week. Table 8.5 shows that from the 4th 1000 level on, the increase required in the amount of reading is 500,000 words per year. From the 7th 1000 level on, over an hour a day five days a week, forty weeks of the year would need to be devoted to reading. This is a lot, but it assumes that this quantity of input is coming only through reading. Spoken sources are of course possible but these provide less intensive input. It takes around two hours to watch a typical 10,000 word movie (a rate of around 83 words per minute, or just over half of a reading rate of 150 words per minute). Nonetheless, an hour to an hour and forty minutes five times a week is possible. There are no magic ways to learn a language without putting time and effort into the learning. However, if this time and effort is guided by knowledge about how to learn a language, and you keep working at learning and using the language, then you will surely be successful and enjoy the thrill of being able to speak another language.