3.1.6 CHUCK: Alternation between formal and informal exposure
n Comprehensible input from mass media.
n Comprehensible input from informal contacts.
Chuck had served as an agricultural attache in Scandinavia, and while there, had
gained quite good control of Danish. He told me about what seemed to have helped
him most.
‘My teacher was using some ordinary textbook,’ he began. ‘You know, the kind
where you go through a series of dialogs. But after a certain point, I began to rely
more just on television and reading the newspapers, and just going out and forcing
myself to talk with people.’
‘In your line of work,’ I observed, ‘you probably met a lot of people who didn’t
speak any English.’
48 Success with Foreign Languages
‘That’s right.’
‘So you just went out and put yourself into contact with the language, and . . .’
‘Yep. Pretty soon it started to come. It was a combination of going through the
book with the teacher, and then going out and using the stuff.’
‘Just conversing with people.’
‘Well, yes, but one thing that I found especially useful was just sitting down in
front of the TV and just listening, being determined to understand what the guy was
saying on the news.’
‘That really worked for you!’
‘Yeah. Of course there were times when I was ready to just pack the whole thing
in and quit and go home and pack bags in the supermarket. I mean, it got dreadful,
because Danish is a pretty ghastly language in terms of the noises they make. The
Danes say they don’t have a language, they have a throat disease!’
‘It sounds like quite a challenge,’ I said.
‘Yes, sometimes I sat there watching this guy babbling, and 1 said to myself, “I’m
never going to learn this language.!” But it’s remarkable. After six months, it was
“All systems go”!’
‘This is beginning to sound like what you told me you did with French and
Italian,’ I commented. ‘In all three, you deliberately put yourself into a position
where you were hearing not just language, but language where you understood a lot
of the content. You didn’t necessarily understand every word.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But you knew enough of the language so that from what you did get of it, you
were able to kind of extrapolate, and get more of it.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘And this meant that you were being exposed to Danish, which consisted partly of
things that you’d already mastered, and partly of things you had not mastered.’
‘Yes, that’s a fair summary. Sometimes you had to guess, and sometimes you
guessed wrong and had to be corrected, but that was basically it. It can be a rather
horrifying experience sometimes, but other times,’ he chuckled, ‘it can be fun!’
Comments
Like Carla, Chuck succeeded by meeting language that was hard enough for him,
but not too hard. This is, of course, the way all children acquire their native
language, and some theorists believe that it can be sufficient for adults also.
One must not generalize on the basis of two brief narrative accounts.
Nevertheless, I can see three suggestive differences between Carla’s experience with
German and Chuck’s with Danish:
n Danish is in some ways a more difficult language than German.
n Chuck’s tested proficiency in Danish was a whole level higher than Carla’s in
German.
n Chuck alternated between formal instruction and informal exposure. Carla did
no formal study after the very beginning of her work with German.
Working with the ideas
An Informal Learner: Carla 49
1. What other differences do you see between Chuck and Carla?
2. In what ways is Chuck’s experience reminiscent of Ann’s or Bert’s?