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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
BECOMING LIKE SHERLOCK
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
That’s a quote from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I think it fits well with language learning.
If you know anything about the character of Sherlock Holmes, you’ll know that he’s very good at noticing the little details. He can glean a lot of information from them, often a lot more than he gleans from the clues that are staring him in the face. These help him to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. Language is definitely a puzzle that you have to put together, don’t you think?
There is something called the Noticing Hypothesis in language learning, which was put forward by Richard Schmidt, an American linguist and professor, in 1990. It suggests that a learner is not able to continue to improve their language learning unless they consciously take notice of what they are consuming in the language - in other words, what we generally now call input. This means noticing the details of the language in action.
Others disagree, because it’s rather a vague concept.
Whatever the rights and the wrongs of the hypothesis are, do you notice things when learning a language? Is it something you do naturally? Does it help you to improve?
I think when you first start learning a language, everything’s a bit of a blur. You’re kind of firefighting as you’re thrown nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjugations, pronouns. It can be quite overwhelming. At this stage, you’re probably not noticing in any easily quantifiable way, because there’s too much stuff - stuff’s a technical term. You’ll be noticing how words go together to become phrases, you’ll be noticing how things are spoken, you’ll be noticing how different the language is from your own. But do you know you’re doing it?
For me real noticing, conscious noticing isn’t something I achieve until I’m well into a language and reading native texts and listening to native speakers. Then, things do jump out at me and I might do a double take and think, ‘Oh, is that a thing?’
When I started reading in Italian, I very much pushed through things I didn’t understand, which I do believe is the right way to do it, I’m not negating that. The point was to consume as much of the language as I could and have the repetition of phrases and constructions become as familiar to me as possible. But there came a point when I didn’t need to push through so much, because I was understanding the vast majority of it without having to look things up.
Then, and this is where I think conscious noticing comes in, I started to focus more on the detail. I would find phrases that I could understand, but wouldn’t likely remember, but that I found interesting, and highlight them. I would see a construction where I didn’t understand why it was like that and try to find out why. I would read something and it clicked with a particular grammar point and I would have an ‘aha’ moment. I would find things I was pretty sure were colloquial sayings that were completely different to English ones, but be able to convert them across to the equivalent English saying, before checking that I was right.
I’m now at a stage where noticing things gives me as much pleasure as the story and it’s definitely helping me to improve.
So, whether or not this hypothesis stands up to scrutiny, I do think that at a certain stage you begin to really notice things in a language and that’s when you start to supercharge your learning.
That’s all for today’s episode, and this series. Series 3 will begin in May. Don’t forget to join me again then, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.