If you've ever doubted whether you're a good language learner, then bear in mind that you've already learned one language very well indeed – your first. But this raises an interesting question: can adults learn a second language in the same way they learned their first as children? And if so, what are the implications for the classroom?
Stephen Krashen and the acquisition of languages
Perhaps no-one has looked at the question more closely than the linguist Stephen Krashen, who has introduced some of the most influential concepts to the study of second-language acquisition.
In his input hypothesis, first proposed in an article published in 1977, and expanded upon in later years, he makes the distinction between learning: the conscious, traditional grammar-based process in the classroom; and acquisition: essentially how we, as children, pick up our first language. He says that our mistake is trying to teach languages in the same way we teach science, history and mathematics. Instead, he believes that learners should acquire second languages in the same way children learn their first.
Krashen sums up the idea in a famous documentary on the subject called A child's guide to learning languages, produced by BBC Horizon in 1983. In the documentary, he says that acquisition is 'where the action is'. In other words, in every successful example of language-learning – an infant mastering a first language, an adult learner of English scoring a band 9 on the IELTS test – the reason for their success is that they have 'acquired' rather than 'learned' the language.
So, how do children and proficient adult learners perform the seemingly magical trick of mastering a language, and what can teachers learn from this? Krashen offers the following ideas:
1. We acquire languages when we can understand ...
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