The Linguist On Language

You continue to read and listen a lot, broadening your range of content. You start some novels which you do not complete. Another three months of heavy listening and reading and word study.

Phase 4.

You continue your input activities but you are now ready to speak. You want to show off.

Your first efforts at showing off end in defeat but you keep coming back for more. You notice where you have trouble. You are about to take off in the language.

How long does it take for an immigrant to learn English?

According to the folks at the American Center for Applied Linguistics, it takes six years of 100 hours a year of class time. (Paragraph below).In my view, anyone living in the US (or Canada), who plans to rely on spending the next six years in a classroom, twice a week, in order to improve his or her English, is probably not going to get too far.

"Extrapolating from the studies of children's language acquisition cited below, it appears that it can take several years. For example, studies suggest that school-aged children need 2 to 3 years to develop social language (conversational skills) and 5 to 7 years to acquire the academic language proficiency needed to reach parity with native English speakers (Cummins, 1991; Thomas & Col ier, 1997). Moreover, school-aged children usual y attend school 5 days a week for approximately 6 hours a day, which is considerably more hours of instruction than adults in adult education programs receive. Therefore, when considering factors that affect gains in English language proficiency and other educational outcomes, it is important to keep in mind the amount of time that may be required for adults to reach the goals that are set.

McHugh, Gelatt, & Fix (2007) examined the number of instructional hours needed for the approximately 5.8 mil ion adult lawful permanent residents currently in the United States to reach a level of proficiency necessary for civic integration or to begin post-secondary education.

They found that an estimated 103 hours of study per person per year for 6 years would be necessary (600 mil ion hours of English language instruction per year for 6 years for over 5 mil ion immigrants). This number of instructional hours is comparable to the number provided to immigrants in other countries, such as Australia and Germany). However, the costs of implementing such a plan would be significant."

First of al it is curious that they estimate the adults can learn so much faster than the school kids. (600 hours versus 7,000 hours). It is not surprising that they postulate that only by bringing these five mil ion immigrants to classrooms will they ever learn.

What would happen if we assumed that the classroom was irrelevant to language learning?

What would happen if we assumed that all the studies, research, teacher training, workshops, conferences etc. on language learning and ESL were more for the teachers, researchers, professors and conference goers, than for the language learners?

What would happen if we started to notice that what the learners do away from the classroom, what they read and listen to, or what movies they watch, who their friends and acquaintances are, where they work, how motivated they are, al of these things are more important than the number of classroom instructional hours, and what kind of classroom techniques are used?

CHAPTER IX: EDUCATORS

Language education has been the preserve of the experts. These are people who have studied linguistics, or grammar. They often have certificates of languages instruction. The public sector is heavily involved in language instruction but private schools and testing companies are also active. It seems, though, as if the prevailing methodology is the same and the results are often disappointing.

Public education

I have been reading Anna Karenina by Tolstoy in Russian and at one point Levin says this to his brother, who is pushing him to get involved in setting up medical and education services for his peasants.

"Perhaps it may al be very good; but why should I worry myself

about establishing dispensaries which I shal never make use of,

and schools to which I shal never send my children, to which

even the peasants don't want to send their children, and to which

I've no very firm faith that they ought to send them?" said he."

Tolstoy did not believe in modern medicine and had his own ideas on education. It may be that Levin is wrong, and that it is a good idea to have medical dispensaries for the public and compulsory education. Certainly politicians have pushed us further and further in that direction.