ESL - Learning English as Second Language

John Jensen, Ph.D.

1.31.10 - John Jensen, Ph.D. - The method I’ve suggested in previous articles works for languages. We can adapt it to teaching English to immigrant students even without knowing their native tongue.

ESL - Learning English as Second Language

by John Jensen, Ph.D.

            The method I’ve suggested in previous articles works for languages. We can adapt it to teaching English to immigrant students even without knowing their native tongue.

            Watching young children learn language offers an important tip. How do they absorb so much so quickly and effortlessly? A factor I believe underrated is a rich basis of meaning versus a constricted basis of meaning.  A single word standing alone has constricted meaning. To appreciate “rich,” imagine that a student in your class has an asthma attack, prompting extreme excitement, frantic efforts, and the arrival of EMTs.  Afterward you write breathe on the board and briefly reprise what happened. The word breathe arrives in their consciousness coupled to a rich personal experience--sight, sound, movement, and emotion—and is likely to be engraved in their memory for a lifetime.

            This matters to language learning because a rich basis of meaning begs for words that describe it.  Words attach to it like glue, which is why I believe young children learn language so easily. Everything they learn fixes to their direct, personal experience. To make language learning easy, then, it makes sense to utilize all the immediate personal experience available, and their physical body and its actions. Whenever we can point to something they directly sense and apply a word to it, we save ourselves many steps of effort.

            For sustaining the meaning beyond its entry into in their awareness, however, we draw on several principles.

            1.  Repetition. We can’t escape repetition in language learning.  “Use it or lose it” holds true.  Even effectively impressing the mind with a new word or idea, we still face the artful challenge of repeating it so it isn’t boring but deepens learning.

            2.  Passive first. Our natural mode of language learning is to recognize words we heard before, guess approximately what they refer to, understand more exactly what they mean, and then say them in active use. This sequence hints that it’s inefficient to push too quickly into active use, moving ahead of this natural pace. The better route is to build on how passive learning--the steady acquisition of understanding--makes later usage easier. Fortunately, most new learners of English are surrounded by it and have many opportunities to stretch their understanding. 

            3.  Personalness. Students remember most clearly what personally relates to them and their friends. They’re inclined to connect “hair” to themselves (“my hair,” “your hair”) than recall it as an abstraction apart from them. By describing them and their personal physical, mental, and emotional world, we appeal to their self-concern. Because they like learning words about themselves, stretching their passive understanding of personal words is an easy category to draw on.

            4.  Location.  Short-term memory gains an assist from spatial orientation. We automatically connect initial thoughts to their physical location (where we were when they occurred), a feature of memory soon lost as the mind generalizes later about what’s important to save.  For a time, however, the tendency remains a natural scaffolding for converting short-term to long-term memory. The well-known “loci” method was invented a couple millennia ago when the roof of a Roman villa collapsed during a dinner party, crushing the guests beyond recognition. The host was able to identify each body because he recalled where everyone was reclining when the disaster occurred.  When we pose a memory as coming from a specific person sitting in particular location, it’s easier for the mind to retain it for a time.

            5.  Three zones.  The strength of the mind’s impression increases when the student records it in the three representational systems of sound, sight, and touch. Students at least hear the word, speak it, and write it, and also act it out if possible. Some people’s minds absorb knowledge better through one or another of these means, so it makes sense to include them all.

            6.  Interval.  As I explain in my book (cf. below), a direct correlation exists between the depth of a memory and the length of time one can remember it without review. The deeper the mind grasps it (more firmly, completely, repeatedly), the longer the student can go without thinking about it and still return to it perfectly. This suggests a kind of rhythm of intervals; at first very short—within a minute or two--and gradually lengthening. 

            Drawing on time interval as a critical lever for learning, on many occasions I’ve led student groups in which, by their conclusion, everyone could remember what everyone else said. All that’s required is pausing after every two or three responses to inquire about a previous response: “Who can remember what Alfonso liked?“ or “What was Jennifer’s experience?” A student's correct, accurate, and respectful answer reinforces the other student’s involvement, and the teacher reinforces the listener’s effort either by comment (“You were listening.  Thank you. You remembered“) or by non-verbal cues delivering the same message.  

            One teacher adapted this approach to discuss feelings for an hour a week with a classroom of middle school students assigned to her because they all had behavior problems. In the course of a school year during which their problems disappeared, I believe that her way of focusing their attention was a major cause. At the end of each discussion she asked them, “Who would like to go for it?“ and a volunteer would narrate what each had contributed for the entire hour. All could do this.

            The practice encouraged everyone to express thoughts that would merit others’ respect, and the possibility that they themselves might be the one to remember everything reinforced their attention. They'd return constantly to the beginning of the period and replay the thread of thought at ever-lengthening time intervals.

            Such instant memories of what just occurred are available about all learning, but disappear rapidly unless they’re immediately built upon and stretched to a longer remembering interval.     

            7.  Reading.  As a day’s body of meaning grows in a student’s mind, we insure that they won’t lose it if we arrange for them to read what they created. A half-century ago when I studied Russian at the Defense Language Institute (then called the Army Language School) in Monterey, California, an officer visited one day who’d graduated from the school and been sent to Korea. He made it a point even there, he said, to keep a Russian newspaper in his pocket and disciplined himself to read it for ten minutes a day.  He discovered that his skill in Russian increased steadily from that single practice even though he had no opportunity to use the language.  

            Especially in the early stages while pronunciation is still a challenge, it helps to re-read aloud correctly what was just learned. Initial memory traces extinguish if they aren’t practiced soon. Returning too much later to them is like continually restarting instead of building on what was done. (As a side note, I believe that the common instructional design for most subjects wastes an enormous amount of time by failing to convert the effort of initial understanding directly into memory when it's easiest to do so.)

            8.  Fluency.  We’ve really learned a new word when we no longer need to pay conscious attention to it and it’s automatically connected to other words.  This presents us an hourly objective. We don’t stop with students’ halting, letter by letter entry into a word but instead want them to shift from sounding out a word to recognizing the word as a single unit, and then to placing it smoothly into a phrase. When they immediately connect words in fluid phrases, we‘re a step ahead. Upon starting with single words, we lead them to this fluency by enabling them to read the words faster and faster while retaining understanding. 

            Lately I’ve filled in part-time in a classroom of high school students who arrived a few months ago from Thailand speaking no English. One day after the school’s opening meeting, I asked them to begin by describing what had just occurred.  They or I would offer a single word, build a sentence around it, associate it with another word, and then stretch it to a second phrase or sentence. I continually returned them to recalling the sentences we had just agreed on (drawing on personalness and location as noted above).  After a couple hours of this (interspersed with brief breaks), I summarized on the board a portion of what we treated in the group and asked them to copy it into their notebooks. Later I’ll have them continue to re-read it to increase their fluency and ground their passive learning until they’re ready to employ it actively. All the events occurred in their direct experience that morning:

“Mr. S. is a teacher.  His students were very noisy.  He asked them to be quiet, but they continued talking. When he was done talking, all the students came upstairs. Sandy (I‘ll give them English names here) was sleepy. He went to bed at midnight last night.  He fell asleep in his chair with his head resting on the back of the chair. Sandy likes to play games with the computer. All the students went to bed at different times last night. Ben was wearing a blue-grey shirt.  His foot was on the chair, and his elbow was on the table. Brad likes football. He is wearing a jacket with green and purple colors. He rubbed his chin and then he picked his nose.  Finally he brushed his hair.  Susan had a pink jacket on, and open-toed shoes with high heels. Penny and Tricia were wearing sandals or flip-flops. The three girls were wearing blue jeans.  The teacher had an earpiece and was wearing glasses. He often asked the students to repeat words and sentences.”  

            The approach comprises several steps:  

            1.  Seat students in a circle so everyone can make eye contact. If you have more than 8-10, use tight concentric circles so they can all see and hear each other easily.

            2.  Pick a theme from their experience that applies to everyone. In the discussion above, we focused on the school’s opening meeting just concluded, and on their physical position, colors, and clothing.  Build out from what everyone can directly observe, and move to personally relevant topics such as their experiences with family, animals, cars, travel, sports, and games;  the activities they engage in, and what they observe and think about. The vocabulary most used links directly to their description of their lives and experiences. For ease of remembering, develop one topic at a time. Link it to a variety of words while you apply it to one student after another.  

            3.  Your standing objective is to enable everyone to remember what everyone else said. Offer a single word, think how they can add to it or use it, and remember who said what.  Your own memory is defines your pace of adding new material. If you don’t remember what each one said, how can you expect them to? You’ll likely find that every two or three responses, you’ll need to pause to ask them to recall what a particular student said about the topic or how it referred to him/her. Engage the whole group by having them repeat a new sentence immediately after you say it.

            4.  After 15-30 minutes of adding new material, pause and write on the writing board everything they’ve  said, have them copy it, retain a copy yourself, and read it aloud together (noisy but necessary). Go on then to another topic or build on the prior one by expanding it with more words. 

            5.  Stop periodically to re-read everything they’ve written so far, and to work with them on their pronunciation.

            6.  Use the resources available. If some have better pronunciation, pair them up to help others. If they enjoy physical action and you have the space, allow them to act out meanings, and then apply steps 2-4 above. If some are leaders who influence the others, set up classroom organization groups (cf. book below). Account for and post their progress group by group.

            7. To make their later reading easier, type out the entire script of their discussions periodically and duplicate it for their permanent notebook. If they develop daily just one page of experienced, understood, written, and practiced learning, by the end of the school year they’ll assimilate 180 pages and be well on their way to language independence.

            8.  If you happen to be fluent in their language yourself, you can help them further by maintaining a separate list of the vocabulary (with translations) that they’ve used in their daily discussions. Practicing the list (partners asking each other to translate) is an independent way to study the same material. A valid way to score their progress objectively is to count up the number of words they can translate. Mount an acetate-covered wall chart with names down the side and a blank space beside each in which they can fill in and update the number of words they master. They love to see their effort accounted for with an objective score.

            The steps above work together to solve the two biggest problems in conveying a new language: how to get a new piece initially installed in a student's mind, and how to convert it to long-term competent use.  We meet the first issue by students' personal connection to an idea presented and by their immediate return to it at expanding intervals. The second is accomplished by writing out what they've just grasped, reading it often later, and then employing previously learned terms in new sentences. They first get it in their head, and then practice a habit that retains it.

            John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Silver Bullet Easy Learning System: How to Change Classrooms Fast and Energize Students for Success (Xlibris, 2008).  He welcomes comments sent to him directly at jjensen@gci.net, and will email an ebook version of his book to anyone without charge upon request.