When Learning Languages, Motivation Matters Most

by Nancy Walser

Bruno della Chiesa is a senior analyst at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2007, he began a new project, Globalisation and Linguistic Competencies, to explore the reasons why students in some schools and countries are more likely to better learn new languages. Della Chiesa is fluent in French, English, German, and Spanish. Recently, he spoke with Harvard Education Letter editor Nancy Walser about non-native language learning.

Why is it important for students, especially native English speakers, to learn another language?
It’s important for many reasons. To be able to communicate with people who don’t speak your mother tongue (as a tourist or in international professional activities) and to increase your competitiveness in the labor market – these are the best-known reasons, and the most obvious ones. And recent work has shown that in terms of cognitive capacities, the “collateral benefits” of becoming bi- or plurilingual are not to be neglected. Moreover, there is also the crucial benefit of developing a sense of diversity in unity that you can’t possibly access that well with any other exercise. When you start to develop a fluency in a second or third language, you suddenly become aware of the diversity of how people think.

At some stage when students are learning a language, they realize that people who speak in another language also tend to think somewhat differently – and that they have a different doxa (common belief). First they see the differences. However, there are also universals and commonalities, and this is equally important, if not more. Every language has a way to express the past, present, and future and a way to express happiness and sorrow, for example. So learning another language is also about developing an awareness of diversity and unit – you learn a bit better who you are, what cultural doxa underlies your language group, and also what it means to be a human being.
You have studied the connections between neuroscience and language learning. What does recent research indicate is the best way to learn a non-native language?
There is really no one best way. The only thing that neuroscience has been able to show definitively so far is that basically when learning another language, the earlier the better. This, of course, confirms intuitive knowledge or daily observation. Nothing new under the sun, except that now we also know why. Still, it’s never too late. There is this notion of brain plasticity: The human brain learns constantly, and that means you can learn a language at any age.

Neuroscience also supports the importance of making the process of learning pleasurable. Learning associated with positive emotions activates the “reward systems” in the brain, which helps in terms of motivation and, hence, success. Students in many countries learn English through all sorts of ways, like listening to English-language songs and trying to understand the lyrics. Such activities should complement other, more traditional (and, to many, more boring) approaches also used in schools. [65] This is an excerpt from the Harvard Education Letter, 2011

3 Read the interview and answer the comprehension questions:

1. What are the reasons that make people learn another language?
2. What is the role of “cognitive capacities” in the polylingual personality formation?
3. What meaning does ‘developing a sense of diversity in unity’ have?
4. What is ‘cultural doxa’?
5. Why are ‘universals and commonalities’ in languages important in language learning?
6. How is neuroscience related to language learning?
7. What does the concept of ‘brain plasticity’ bring to language learning?
8. How do positive emotions influence the process of language learning?

CONCEPT STUDY

Use the words in boxes A and B and make up collocations.

A cognitive collateral cultural universals and diversity and brain intuitive daily activate complement

B approaches doxa benefits observation plasticity capacities commonalities ‘the reward system’ knowledge unit

2 Use the collocations in your speech.

COMMUNICATION

Role play the interview with Bruno della Chiesa.

Role play the following situations.

1. You work as a Foreign Language teacher at school, your collegue has asked you for advice. Discuss the ways of making the process of learning enjoyable.
2. You are an undergraduate. You think that it is possible to study languages in the absence of the language environment. Your groupmate would like to go abroad for studies as he/she thinks that one should live in the target-language socio-cultural environment to achieve the language mastery. Talk to each other.

Summarize the interview.

INFORMATION-ACCUMULATION: WATCHING A VIDEO

Revise what you know about the comprehensible input, then generate your ideas on what comprehensive learning is.

Comment on the quotation on the quotation.

3 Watch the part of Stephen Krashen’s lecture ‘Fundamentals of Language Acquisition and Bilingual Education’ at www.youtube.com/watch? v=eo8JZmXC85k and make notes about two samples of the lessons [66].

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