My experience took place in 1974 when I was briefly living in exile from California working at the
City University of New York at Queen’s College, as Director of English as a Second Language. And like everyone else in New York, we lived in a big apartment building.
City University of New York at Queen’s College, as Director of English as a Second Language. And like everyone else in New York, we lived in a big apartment building.
And the apartment next door to us was owned by a Japanese company. And every year there’d be a new family in the apartment. And every year there were the children who couldn’t speak English. And there I was, Director of English as a Second Language. I will teach English to these children and brag about it to my friends.
So I remember going up to the little girl next door. She was four years old; her name was Hitomi, and I didn’t know about this material on language acquisition then. Nobody did. And I thought then the way you get people to acquire language is you get them to practice talking. So I tried to get her to talk. I’d say, “Hitomi, talk to me. Say ‘Good morning.’ Say ‘Hi.’” No response.
Well, clearly I decided I’ve got to make this more concrete. “Hitomi, say ‘ball.’” No response. Well obviously, I’ve got to break it down into its component parts. Let’s work on initial consonants. “Say ‘B.’” “Look at my lips.” Again, no response. There was a theory going around then that a lot of people still believe that children don’t really want to acquire language. You have to kind of force it out of them, so I tried that, “I won’t give you the ball until you say ‘ball.’” That didn’t work either.
No matter what I said Hitomi wouldn’t speak. She didn’t say anything the first week. She didn’t say anything the second week, the first month, the second month. [It was] five months until she started to speak. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Children during this stage do pick up certain expressions from the other children in the neighborhood.
It’s not real language. They understand approximately what they mean. Again, it’s not real language. They were rough idea of what it means. They use it in roughly appropriate situations. Things like “Leave me alone.” “Get out of here.” In fact, one child I knew the only thing he could say was “I kick your ass!” [He] said it everywhere. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant.
After about five months, Hitomi started to speak, and several things were interesting about her language. First, it looked a lot like first language acquisition, the same process our children went through. One word, two words, gradually getting more complicated. Second, it came quickly. By the time Hitomi and her family went back to Japan at the end of the year, her English was closing in on the way the other children in the neighborhood were talking.
The question is this. “What was going on during those five months?” She was listening. She was picking out comprehensible input. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition. Let me repeat that. When she started to speak, it was not the beginning of her language acquisition. It was the result of all the comprehensible input she had gotten over those five months.
What counts in speaking is not what you say, but what the other person says to you. In other words, when you get involved in conversation, what counts is the input that you can stimulate from other people.
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