Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  Although top-down processing is clearly very important, it’s not the whole story. Bottom-up processing, which is also referred to as data-driven processing, is the opposite of top-down processing. This term refers to situations in which you perceive a stimulus without preconceptions or assumptions about what you’re experiencing. Instead of being guided by expertise or familiarity, bottom-up perception depends solely on information that comes from your five senses. For example, vision and hearing are mostly bottom up until the brain can make sense of what was seen or heard. If you wear glasses, then you are correcting for a deficit in the data your eye must use in order for your brain to see. Glasses correct a bottom-up problem.

  Virtually all language skills require the interaction of both top-down and bottom-up processing. Reading and understanding a short story is a good example of such an interaction. You need to decode the letters and words on the page, and match them against representations in long-term memory, which is bottom-up processing. However, you also have to make use of your knowledge of the characters’ histories and motivations, and how stories work, which is very much top-down processing.4

  Adult language learners excel at top-down processing because of their extensive world knowledge and experience. For example, because you already have an understanding of basic narrative structures (think of “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back”), you can capitalize on your knowledge of these expectations while reading in ways younger readers may not be able.5 As we get older, and our hearing and vision become less acute, savvy adult language learners will offset any such decline by drawing upon their greater world knowledge. Insights from cognitive science can show you how to do this.

  What Does “Meta” Mean?

  Before exploring how this research can help you learn a new language, it is necessary to introduce the concept of meta. Although the meaning of words like cognition, memory, and linguistics is fairly straightforward, you may not be familiar with the concepts of metacognition, metamemory, or metalinguistics. Let’s look at what these are, and why they will be so important in the chapters that follow.

  Metacognition, simply put, is thinking about thinking, and metamemory is thinking about memory. Most of the time, cognitive processes function so smoothly and effortlessly that we rarely pause to reflect on them. However, when we are fooled by an optical illusion, or try to understand a friend’s failure to follow simple directions, or mishear what someone said, we may briefly stop and consider the way that our mind works (or momentarily fails to work). This is metacognition, and it is the greatest strength of adult learners.

  It’s not easy to infer what children know about their mental processes. Certainly their cognitive skills are improving all the time as they gain more experience in the world. As anyone who has children knows, the changes happen in leaps and bounds. However, the full range of metacognitive and metamemory abilities are not fully developed until adulthood.6 This is hardly surprising, since young children haven’t had enough experience with cognitive successes and failures to be able to make many generalizations based on these experiences. It’s also the case that the consequences of poor memory in young children are rarely serious. Little kids have an incredibly sophisticated external memory device (better known as “mom” or “dad”) to keep track of anything that the child must do or remember. If the child forgets or doesn’t understand, mom or dad is there to help.

  Adults, however, have developed a more sophisticated understanding of their cognitive processes, but it’s not perfect and may vary by subject matter.7 Adults have learned, for example, that they can memorize a seven-digit phone number, but not a twenty-digit package tracking number. They know that it’s helpful to mentally rehearse directions that they are given, or to use strategies that make computer passwords easier to remember. But it may not be intuitive how metacognitive abilities can be applied to foreign language learning.

  Metalinguistic awareness is somewhat different. It refers to knowing about how your language works, and not just knowing a language. Metalinguistics is not the history of the language, or knowing word origins, but rather knowing how to use language to do things: how to be polite, or to lie, or to make a joke. Once again, this is an area in which adults excel, even if they aren’t really aware that they possess this knowledge. But no one is born with this skill—for example, it’s been demonstrated that politeness routines are learned in childhood from parents, who ask for the “magic word” before their kids are allowed to excuse themselves from the dinner table.8

  In adulthood, metalinguistic knowledge can be impressively precise. Knowing the difference between a clever pun and a groan-inducing one, for example, reflects fairly sophisticated metalinguistic awareness.

  The good news about metacognitive skills is that you don’t have to learn them all over again when you start learning a new language. Instead, you only need to take the metalinguistic, metamemory, and metacognitive abilities you’ve already developed in your native language and apply them to the study of your target language.

  2

  Set Yourself Up for Success

  Well Begun Is Half Done

  Well begun is half done.

  —attributed to both Aristotle and Mary Poppins

  Imagine an adult learner who has just enrolled in his first Japanese class. This student decides that the best way to learn the ninety-two modern written kana that represent the sounds of Japanese is to create a practice book. For each kana, he creates a separate page. At the top of the page he affixes a picture of the kana with a diagram showing the stroke order. The rest of the page contains uniform blank squares for writing practice. He arranges these sheets into two notebooks (one for hiragana, the other katakana) and creates attractive covers so that he can take the notebooks with him to practice whenever he has free time. The problem with this strategy is that he spends all his time preparing to study the kana—but not actually studying them. What he sees as good preparation is really wasted time (and paper). By the second week of class he lags behind the other students and ends up dropping the class midway through the term. Clearly, this student did not begin well. But what exactly went wrong?

  When it comes to studying a foreign language, beginning well doesn’t start on the first day of class or the first day in a foreign country. It starts with the decision to study the language: if this decision is not entered into wisely, the actual study of the language will be surprisingly difficult. Faulty decision making can cause students to question their abilities, which then leads to decreased motivation and consequently more struggling with the language. Such a downward spiral culminates in disappointment and disillusionment. Because cognitive scientists study how people make decisions, their research in this area can help with the decision on where, when, and how to study a foreign language. That is the best way to begin well.

  Although some people make decisions by adding up perceived pros and cons in a loosely mathematical way, that approach doesn’t work with complex decisions such as whether to start (or restart) studying a foreign language. As in most of life, when it comes to these kinds of decisions, there is no precise formula to guide us. Decisions on complex issues like studying a foreign language must be approached flexibly, because these decisions are invariably made in the absence of complete information. One reason for disappointment with foreign language learning is that the decision is often made without a realistic appraisal of what it will take to succeed—or without even knowing how to define success. Whether they know it or not, even for individuals who have successfully studied one foreign language, the decision to study another one still requires a good deal of forethought. But it is possible to master a “super hard” language like Chinese but not a “world language” like French—it happens more often than you’d expect.

  Whenever people make decisions, big or small, in the face of such uncertainty, they rely on cognitive strategies called heuristics. These mental shortcuts, or rules of thumb, are “good enough” strategies that can be resorted to when
a decision must be made in the face of unknown and unknowable information (which is most of the time). And often enough, using heuristics to make a decision is a smart option.

  One very useful heuristic strategy is called the availability heuristic, which states that the more quickly and easily examples of a phenomenon can be generated mentally, the more common that phenomenon is likely to be. Let’s try it. Which name is more common in the United States: Mary or Matilda? One way to answer this question would be to search the Internet for relevant statistics about baby names. But in this case you probably don’t feel the need to do so, since you can come up with the right answer more quickly using the availability heuristic. You would probably say the name Mary is more common, since you can think of more people named Mary than you can think of people named Matilda. This is the beauty of the availability heuristic: it is quick, easy, and most of the time leads to an answer that is good enough for the circumstances. In case you doubt the power of heuristic strategies, they are generally so useful and so efficient that cognitive scientists who work in the area of artificial intelligence have long sought ways to teach computers how to take advantage of them.1

  Unfortunately, like all heuristics, the availability heuristic is not foolproof. For example, people are more likely to buy earthquake insurance immediately after an earthquake. But they tend to drop coverage over time, because as the memory of the earthquake fades, the necessity of earthquake insurance seems less urgent—when in fact, the likelihood of an earthquake is actually increasing as time passes without one.2

  The point here is not to avoid using the availability heuristic—that would be impossible. Rather, the point is that for all their strengths, heuristics have weaknesses that can sabotage the best-laid plans. This is especially true when it comes to studying a foreign language as an adult.

  Related to the availability heuristic is the simulation heuristic, which works in much the same way, but which inadvertently can lead to frustration for the adult language learner. According to the simulation heuristic, the more quickly and easily you can create a mental scenario in which an event occurs, the more likely you will be to predict that the event will occur. For example, how likely is it that you will become president of the United States? To answer this question, you need to create a mental simulation in which you think about all the things that would have to happen for you to become the president: the more things that would have to happen, the more unlikely the outcome will seem to you. If you are like Roger or Richard, the possibility of becoming president will seem quite remote. If you are the vice president, it will seem less so.

  As with the availability heuristic, to simulate becoming the president, you must access your memory for relevant information. As you do, you will be influenced by how quickly you can access this information from memory and also by how relevant it is to the scenario you are creating. Experiences that you recall easily and that seem similar to the present scenario will add to your confidence. For example, if you successfully ran for the governor of a state, you could more easily imagine a situation where you are elected president than if you had only successfully run for class treasurer in high school.

  In the same way, deciding to study a foreign language requires visualizing what it will take to reach a desired level of competence. But once you decide to study a foreign language, if you don’t reach your goal, is the reason that you, as an adult, have difficulties learning a foreign language, or could it be that the simulation heuristic failed you in some important ways? Let’s explore some weaknesses in the simulation heuristic that, if avoided, can help better predict what it will take to successfully master a foreign language.

  One reason a simulation does not always align with the actual outcome of an event is because of a trap called the planning fallacy.3 The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate how much time, effort, or money it will take to accomplish a goal. This is because we tend to be overly confident about our ability to reach a goal and misjudge the resources that are required. One need only look at the nightly news to see examples of where the planning fallacy has derailed outcome expectations.

  We become susceptible to a planning fallacy when we focus too much on the good things that will happen when we achieve a goal and not enough on the resources it will take for us to reach that goal. For example, in deciding to study a foreign language, you might think about how wonderful it will be to order food in a restaurant, flirt, or read a local newspaper. Thinking about outcomes can be motivating, but they should not form the core of the decision-making process. One way to avoid the planning fallacy, therefore, is to separate the reasons for wanting to master a language from the specific steps that must be accomplished in order to master it.

  In a mental simulation, focusing on the process of what it will take to reach a goal results in better planning than focusing on the outcome of what will happen once the goal is achieved. Not only does such process-focused planning result in a greater probability of actually reaching the goal, it also reduces stress along the way.4 In other words, in deciding whether or not to study French, think about how each day must be structured in order to find the time to study, rather than how great it will be to toss off witty bons mots at the café Les Deux Magots.

  Another reason for incorrect planning when creating a mental simulation is the tendency to be overly optimistic about the outcome of events. The simulation is often based on an ideal situation where everything goes exactly as planned, without taking into consideration all of the things that could go wrong. For example, Richard decided to spend a month in Brazil studying Portuguese. He thought that a month would give him enough time to reach the level of mastery he needed to take a telephone test in Portuguese for the Foreign Service. To do this, Richard went to Rio de Janeiro, enrolled in a Portuguese language class, and was mugged the day he arrived. That certainly wasn’t the fault of the Portuguese language, and it may in fact have been a good thing since he became more careful afterward, but he also spent more time in his hotel room and not out meeting people. Consequently, Richard did not improve his Portuguese as rapidly as he had expected, he did not pass the telephone test, and he had to spend another month studying in Brazil the following year. The moral of the story is not to avoid being mugged (though that is also good advice), but to expect the unexpected when charting a course of action. Doing so will lead to less frustration when things don’t go as planned—and they won’t.

  Finally, because the simulation heuristic works well most of the time, when it doesn’t, people blame their own abilities—or worse, those of others—rather than recognizing the real culprit: how the heuristic was used. Such blame may be reinforced by what is called counterfactual thinking, which is a mental simulation that occurs after the fact and focuses on what might have been. For example, who do you think is happier to be standing on the winners’ platform during the Olympics—the silver medalist or the bronze medalist? Even though silver is higher than bronze, the smile of the bronze medalist is usually much brighter than that of the silver medalist. The bronze medalist can easily create a simulation whereby she came in fourth; the silver medalist can just as easily create a simulation whereby he captured the gold.5

  Once you’ve made the decision to study a foreign language, some other heuristics can also adversely affect the outcome. One of these is called anchoring and adjustment. This heuristic specifies that it is difficult for us to move very far away from what we have initially decided—even when the reality of the situation necessitates a change in plans. For example, adult language learners may slavishly follow a preset lesson plan (i.e., the anchor) even when it becomes clear that it is not very effective. Although we may make minor adjustments to plans when something is not proceeding well, it is unlikely that we will make the kind of drastic changes that are often needed. You probably know someone who continued to create and study flashcards in order to memorize vocabulary words when, in fact, this strategy was not particularly effective. He might have adjusted the task by studying
fewer flashcards at a time, or by switching from index cards to an electronic format; however, he never considered simply abandoning the anchor, that is, to stop using flashcards altogether.

  A related error in decision making that can trip up even the most dedicated language learner is the confirmation bias, which happens when people give more credence to information that confirms their beliefs, while at the same time ignoring or discounting information that goes against these beliefs. The confirmation bias works against groups and individuals both in planning and carrying out a course of action. By ignoring contradictory feedback, we lose the opportunity to make changes that could drastically improve the probability of success. It can be a problem of Titanic proportions, so to speak.

  Consider the first myth of this book: Adults cannot acquire a foreign language as easily as children. Meeting an adult who tried but failed to learn a foreign language failure confirms the belief. Meeting an adult who succeeded is written off as a fluke, when in fact, plenty of people can and do successfully master a foreign language in adulthood.

  The confirmation bias is at work in all kinds of stereotypes—take your pick. Once you know what to look for, it’s easy to see, but it’s not so easy to change. Interestingly, negative stereotypes about aging can affect more than just one’s attitude about language learning; they can also affect one’s health. For example, maintaining positive beliefs about aging is associated with fewer cardiovascular incidents.6