The Linguist On Language

3) It is very difficult for people to work in a second language. It is what Fraser cal s the "immigrant" experience, always feeling stupid and unable to express oneself. This feeling of inadequacy should, in his view, be equal y shared by English and French-speaking Canadians, at least in the Federal government.

4) A fortune has been spent on encouraging Canadians to become bilingual with relatively little result.

Federal y $60 mil ion annual y is paid in "bilingual bonuses" to bilingual bureaucrats. The government has billion dollar program to make Canadians more bilingual. Yet fewer students take French in schools and universities today than before. Even children who spend all their school lives in French immersion mostly do not become fluent speakers. (They spend too much time listening to non-native speakers around them speaking poor French).

5) There are other inconsistencies. Almost 40% of all federal government jobs are designated bilingual. The test of language competence, as well as the language teaching programs, are run by traditional language teachers worried about the subjunctive and other niceties of French, that even many Quebecois do not necessarily master.

The biggest reaction I had to the book was that you cannot legislate people to learn another language. You cannot force people to learn another language. You have to make it interesting, fun and effective. I get the impression that billions of dollars have been spent in Canada over the last 40 years to prove this and with relatively little benefit to the average tax-payer.

CHAPTER XIII: HOW THE BRAIN LEARNS

For too long we have been conditioned to think that learning can only happen in classrooms. Learning happens in our brains and all we have to do is provide the brain with rich input and experience, and we can learn.

Gerald Edelman

I recently read the book Second Nature Brain Science and Human Knowledge, by Gerald Edelman, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine. I cannot claim to understand everything in the book. Edelman claims it is an attempt to create a brain-based epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Much of Edelman's professional career has been in the study of the body’s immune system and the selectionist or Darwinian response of our genes to virus and germs that attack it. He has found a similar selectionist response in how the neurons in our brain deal with information.

He begins with a description of this amazing three-pound (1.5 kilogram) organ with its 30 billion nerve cells or neurons. These carry signals in the brain and connect with other neurons to form synapses. The amazing thing is the sheer number of combinations possible and that these synapses are plastic, adaptable, throughout our lives. The next important point to realize is that the brain does not operate like a computer. It does not operate based on logic, but by pattern recognition. The sensory input is not coded tape but a rich, infinitely variable and often ambiguous set of signals. The brain has to order these in order to create knowledge.

In order to deal with the large amount of information the brain receives, it relies on comparison or association, and has to sacrifice precision. This process is one of selectionism, in which neurons from different areas of the brain respond to input, in a manner that necessarily includes error and ambiguity. Any attempt to impose precision would limit the amount of knowledge that the brain can acquire. The brain's own value system, its likes and dislikes, the production of dopamine in response to certain stimulus, all of this influences the learning process. Learning is a creative process and an individual process, influenced by the will or intent of the learner.

I have simplified and probably misunderstood much. Nevertheless, I found that the message in this book was very much in line with how I learn languages. I need to be stimulated by information in the language, in audio and written form, and I need a lot of it. The neurons in my brain selectively respond to this input by forging new networks or maps. With repetition these maps are reinforced. As a result, the new language gradual y becomes clearer for me. My learning activities consist of helping the brain form the connections and associations necessary to recognize patterns in the new language. A large part of this is relating new words to words I already know in my language, and then relating them to sounds by combining written text with audio files. Eventually I get used to connecting words together in phrases in the language I am studying.