Learning from listening and reading
- Most language is learned from listening and reading, and Pasifika students learn a great deal this way.
- Pasifika students will not reach the level required for success at school without learning from speaking and writing, as well as from explicit teaching.
- To make their learning from listening and reading as effective as possible, teachers need to find out whether students understand the learning materials well enough to learn new language from them.
Can students extend their language learning just by listening and reading?
Languages are different from other school curriculum areas in that they can be learned without any direct teaching. All children learn their first languages this way. In the global context, most second languages are probably learned as a result of participating in a speech community , through the process known as language acquisition .
Because languages can be learned without any deliberate teaching, researchers of second-language learning and teaching have been interested in how well learners can learn just from listening and reading – that is, from input .
The sixth of Ellis’s principles of successful language instruction states that “successful instructed language learning requires extensive target-language input” (Ministry of Education, 2006b, page 6).
The bilingual Pasifika learners in New Zealand schools are in a second-language environment for a large part of their time, and they will certainly learn English from hearing and reading it, especially as they have strong practical reasons to do so. In the same way, they will learn some, or a lot, of one or more Pasifika languages by hearing them. They may also learn from reading these languages, both within and outside of school.
The more opportunities schools can provide for their bilingual Pasifika students to listen and read in a Pasifika language, the more the students’ knowledge of their Pasifika languages will be extended. Parents are not in a position to do exactly the same things schools can do in this area, because they don’t have direct access to the high-quality curriculum-related materials in Pasifika languages that are produced for schools.
The inquiries under the topic headings Students working together and Focus on language look at findings that show student output and interaction are needed for them to reach the highest levels of language skill. However, most new language is learned from input – that is, understanding what we hear and read.
The comprehension (or input) hypothesis
In the comprehension hypothesis (originally called ‘input hypothesis’), Stephen Krashen (1985) expressed the idea that we learn languages from listening and reading. His hypothesis is that we learn new and more language items (for example, words and sentence structures) by understanding them in the context of other languages we already understand. So if someone tells us something that we understand, and they use one word that we don’t know, we are likely to understand that word and learn it because we understand the rest of the context it occurs in. Krashen sometimes expresses this as i + 1 – we learn new language from input we understand (i) plus new items at one (1) level beyond the comprehensible material.
In a paper discussing applications of the comprehension hypothesis , Krashen (2004) writes:
The Comprehension Hypothesis states that we acquire language when we understand messages, when we understand what people tell us, and when we understand what we read.
The Comprehension Hypothesis also applies to literacy: Our reading ability, our ability to write in an acceptable writing style, our spelling ability, vocabulary knowledge, and our ability to handle complex syntax is the result of reading.
As you can see from the box above, it is sometimes suggested that students can learn all they need to know in language and literacy from reading. However, very few children, if any, would achieve highly in school with no direct teaching at all about spelling, writing, what texts mean, how they are organised, and so on. Language input on its own is not sufficient to enable bilingual students to achieve the high levels of academic language proficiency that are the key to long-term success in education. Students who are directly taught aspects of language, as well as receiving plenty of quality input, learn faster and achieve more.
You can find further information in the following resources:
- Franken, May, and McComish look at input in Section 5.2 of their Literature Review (2005).
- Rod Ellis discusses learning from input in his review of instructed second-language acquisition under Principle 6: Successful instructed language learning requires extensive L2 input.
- Stuart McNaughton (2002, page 171) also looks at what can be learned from input.
Comprehensible input
The language input that we understand is known as comprehensible input . This is the input we can learn from. Students need to have very large amounts of comprehensible input to make good progress with language development.
How do we know if input is comprehensible to our students or not? The English Language Learning Progressions (2007) outlines the stages involved in learning to read English as an additional language, and some of the factors that affect comprehension.
One way you can judge whether the input of a particular text is likely to be comprehensible for your students is by looking at the number of words in the text that they know the meaning of. Paul Nation (2001) notes that:
- learners need to know between 95 and 98 per cent of the words they are reading in order to understand and read material easily
- to read independently, without any difficulty, only two out of every 100 words can be words the readers do not understand well.
The inquiry How many words should my students know? shows an easy way of checking the difficulty of words in a text. You can also use measures of readability (see the associated material Measuring readability ) to compare material that you think your students may find difficult, with the levels of difficulty in material that you know they can easily understand.
The easiest approach is to show your students a text and ask them to point out or underline all the words they are not sure they understand. If they are unsure of more than five words per 100, they will only be able to study from this text with support. They will not be able to read it independently, fluently, and easily, with enjoyment and good comprehension.
Learning activities
Difficult input does not always need to be discarded or simplified. It may be suitable for instructional material used in a scaffolded way in the class. In fact, there is evidence that students make better progress:
- from texts that are elaborated rather than simplified
- from working with material in ways that allow them to interact and process the meaning at deeper levels
Franken, May, and McComish (2005, Section 5.2.3, pages 60 ff. and Section 5.4.5, pages 73 ff.), discuss these points.
Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1 to 4, Effective Literacy Practice in Years 5 to 8, and Effective Literacy Strategies in Years 9 to 13 (Ministry of Education, 2003, 2006a and 2004 respectively) provide many general suggestions for helping students engage successfully in deep processing of meaning.
The Ministry of Education CD-ROMs and Selections series teachers’ notes (see Ministry of Education Pasifika and ESOL Resources ) suggest multiple ways of scaffolding EAL students in the context of classroom work with specific texts.
While students are working on a topic or task and using associated language to discuss it with others, they are going over and over the same language in many different ways. These processes of interconnecting (or ‘networking’, Meara, 1996, 2004) and repetition are probably what result in language being learned permanently. (See the inquiry What do students learn from interaction? .)
Long’s (1983) interaction hypothesis was based on a review of current studies of the time, and has been confirmed by later studies. According to Long, although it is possible to learn a certain amount from input only, languages cannot be fully learned without interaction as well. This is because learners receive feedback on their own errors during the process of interaction. This feedback is focused, it is at an appropriate level for the speaker, and it is timed just after the speaker’s error. In the process of negotiating meaning, participants in interactions seek clarification from the people they are speaking with, and check their own comprehension.
When is an item permanently learned?
There has been a lot of research into how long it takes to learn a new word and its meaning. A small proportion of words are permanently learned the first time they are encountered (perhaps 4–5 per cent). The rest take up to 20 encounters before they are permanently learned.
Learners’ encounters with new words can be spaced in a particular way to be most effective. On the first day, there should be several encounters, not just one. There should be several more encounters spread over the week, then a few in each of the following two weeks, some during the next month, and then one or two in following months. This means that it’s likely to take half a year of regular encounters for all students to learn a particular set of words permanently.
Students don’t just have to learn the word and its meaning; they also have to learn its collocations and grammar. (See the table under the subheading “Extending students' vocabulary” in the inquiry Which words do my students need next? .)
Because there’s a lot to learn for each language item, and because language items take many encounters to be permanently and fully learned, a great deal of recycling and repetition needs to be built into language learning.
See Nation (2001) for full details about vocabulary learning and its importance.
