May 9, 2005
by Keith Law
On Monday I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Dick Schmidt, the director of the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai'i. The center's goal is to compile and create resources for the teaching of foreign languages, particularly those for which current resources are insufficient.
Tell me about the National Foreign Language Resource Center. What areas do you study in your research projects?
Okay. First of all there are 14 of them in the US, we're all funded out of by grants from the US Department of Education with the mandate of improving foreign language instruction - both learning and teaching in the US, but particularly less commonly taught languages. Our first focus is on languages that are not very commonly taught. And that's because there's a national interest in having some people who have some degree of familiar or fluency in most languages, but most languages are not taught. So in Hawai'i we've mostly focused on languages of Asia and the Pacific, but our research projects are meant to be broadly applicable to learning and teaching of all languages.
We try to pick a not commonly taught language to do the research in. There's a long standing tradition of saying, "Lets do it in English and let everybody copy that." We try to do it the other way around, like, "Let's do it in Korean, and everybody else can copy that!" Sometimes you can't, because sometimes for the research to be generalizable you need numbers, which in some languages you can't get, so certain kinds of research you can't do that way.
We're a resource center, not really a research center. We have a mandate to do research, but that's just part of what we do. Materials, developments, teacher training, those are the major categories of what we do.
How many staffers/students do you have?
We have only two full-time people - I'm not full-time, I'm 50%. One is our project coordinator and the other is our publications specialist. There are about 20 faculty members who are affiliated with us, but they give us various percentages of their time, that's just project driven, depends on which projects we're doing in a particular year.
We have five offices, in a termite-ridden temporary structure - which is really cool, actually. There's no air conditioning, but there's always a cool breeze blowing through. It's kind of shabby chic.
You seem to have an emphasis on less commonly taught languages. Are there differences in how such languages are taught or acquired?
There are huge differences in the resources. We did a survey a couple of years ago of the Austronesian language group, which is a very big group that includes about 500 languages. And only 80 of them have a dictionary and a grammar. So there's two basic things you'd like to have - a dictionary and some kind of a sketch of the grammar - and 420 don't even have that.
There are a few languages for which there's a big commercial market, but if you go beyond that there isn't any commercial market, therefore there's almost nothing available.
We put out a reading text in a language called Manchu which is the Manchurian language. I don't think there are more than a dozen people who study that in a year. We put out a small text through the University of Hawai'i Press. It turned out to be one of the Press's best-sellers for the year, although I'm sure that's just because libraries said, "Do we have anything on Manchu. No? Well, we'd better have one." The Chinese kept their military records in Manchu for several hundred years, so the language is of interest to military historians. There's no dictionary in English, no grammar in English, and there's one reading text. The same person who did that text is translating a reference grammar from Chinese.
There are also languages that aren't like that, aren't that small, don't have that few students, but there are lots of languages in the US that people are interested in for heritage reasons. Those languages are growing in interest and they're kind of in between: They're not self-supporting like Spanish & French, but they're getting there, the major Asian languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese - they're beginning to develop commercial markets where we won't have to do that [develop new resources] any more.
Is your focus more on instruction or self-study? Do you think the resources required are different for each?
I think the situation is quite different for people who have access to instruction and for those who don't or who don't like it.
I don't think the best way is to just go where it's spoken and think that somehow you're just going to magically pick it up. I think the best way to learn is some kind of combination of exposure and instruction, including self-study. Through self-study you can do a lot of the things that a teacher would do, but it's useful to have a guide too. You're relying on public resources and there are limits to those, and relying on your own ability as a detective to learn how a language works. Which is really good but there are limits to it. It's really hard to figure out what it is that you don't know through self-study.
Some people really don't like to be taught. If I get in a language class, I wouldn't want to have me as a student. I want to control my own learning. People vary in their need for autonomy and control over their own learning; for those, very independent self-study is great. I'm like that - I would prefer to do it myself. I see among undergrads that if you give them a choice, they don't have a clue - they would rather be told what to do.
I noticed you've done some research on the importance of attention and motivation for adult language learners. What have you learned about the roles of those two factors?
I read the interview you did with Barry Farber, and looked at his book. He talks about that a lot, and he was right on; I agreed with most of everything that was there. I think attention and motivation are kind of the key to learning - not just language learning, but learning anything. And that point of view is becoming more accepted now, but for the last 20 years but it's been kind of opposed to some of the most prominent people and what they thought.
Noam Chomsky, the "great" linguist, among other things stresses the degree to which our knowledge of language is unconscious, not only unconscious but inaccessible to consciousness. That has been taken over in the second language and foreign language field, changed a little bit so there's a very common belief that people can pick up second languages unconsciously by being exposed to them, and that that's real language learning; learning the rules is kind of irrelevant. That idea kind of took hold in the language field in the early 1970s, and by the mid-1990s it was sort of a given that people thought that, and it always seemed to me to be really wrong. So I've put a lot of effort into trying to combat that idea. You have to do a lot of mental work, it's not just a question of relaxing and letting the language into your unconscious. I think people don't learn much of anything that way.
So I started going outside the language field and looking at psychology and at what people think about conscious and unconscious learning. Things I had always thought true about conscious and unconscious are not true, they're just myths. You know the story about Coke ads in movie theaters? The idea is that sometime in the 1950s, unscrupulous advertisers would splice ads into movies. Every sixteenth frame would say something like, "you're thirsty, drink coke." It's fake! It's made up! I know who made it up, it's no secret any more, it was a guy named Norman Cousins, he was the editor of the Saturday Review. He made it up as a satire on advertising, a speculation of what might happen in the future. It was picked up by Vance Packard who wrote a book called the Hidden Persuaders, so everyone knows about the thing that allegedly happened. In experiments, if you try that kind of thing, it has no effect. This idea that sneaky little messages get into your mind and influence your behavior isn't true.
That made me think this whole "romance of the unconscious" is really not right. I was reading psychologists who said that attention is the key to learning. I think that what you learn is what you pay attention to, if you don't pay attention to something then you won't learn it. I told my mother that, and she said "My God! Do you have to have a PhD to know that? That's just common sense."
And then motivation is the other thing too. I think it's the key to language learning. But there's all kinds of motivation, people have all kinds of reasons to learn languages, people who are just curious and want to know everything about every language. I had a friend in the Middle East who learned hieroglyphics. That's just useless, there's no jobs, no flight attendants who have to deal with hieroglyphics, no community of people to get to know, it's purely internal. People are motivated by so many different things. Language study is really going up in the US. Some of it is part of the reaction to 9/11, but that's not all. There's been a huge increase in the people studying languages in the US.
What is your opinion of the axiom that it is easier to acquire languages after the second one?
Sure, absolutely. That's assured. There's a little bit of debate about why. There are 2 points of view. One is that it has to do with cognitive flexibility, once you've learned one foreign language you have strategies to approach another. There's that point of view. There's another one, that learning a third language or fourth or fifth is easier just because you have more knowledge of what languages are like, what the possibilities are like, and you have a lot more that you can bring to bear on it. If you already know Spanish and French, Portuguese is a breeze, but that has nothing to do with the strategies; your knowledge is transferable.
Definitely, it's true that languages become easier because you have more knowledge of how languages work; I'm not sure about the strategies. I think if you know a bunch of European languages, I'm not sure if it's going to help you learn Chinese, where there's no shared vocabulary, and there are things like tones that you won't acquire in any European language.
For whatever the reason, if you learn a couple of languages, the next one comes a little more easily. Except age comes into play. I learned Arabic when I was in my 20s, which was supposed to be hard and I didn't find it hard. When I was in my 40s, I tried Portuguese and I found it really hard.
What's your opinion of some of the existing self-study materials? How about the Pimsleur method? Or some of the other OTC ones? Audioforum? Are you familiar with any of these methods?
No I haven't, I used to read the ads in magazines when I was on airplanes, but I never did try that so I don't have any opinion about it. I've done things like I went to Brazil, so of course I went to bookstores and tried to find anything I could, and some of them were just horrible rubbish, and I picked up a little Portuguese-English dictionary from Berlitz. It was rubbish! All they did was give you the cognates, so if you looked up "simpatico," it says "sympathetic" - that's just wrong! I thought, "That's pretty hopeless."
Is there anything new and interesting going on at your center right now?
There's a new project here we call language documentation. It's not on our Web site because we don't have funding for it.
It was started by grad students. They're training native speakers of very uncommonly taught languages to document their own languages. It's very cool. They're mostly languages I've never heard of. We just find them on campus! It's a very international campus but of course you could say that about almost any campus.
I'd love to be in Afghanistan right now - there's a whole bunch of languages there that are poorly documented.
Finally, make me jealous: tell me the temperature there at Manoa today.
Manoa is the name of a valley, from Waikiki it's straight up towards the mountain. We're really in Honolulu. It's probably about 84, that's what it is most of the time. looks up the temperature. Hey! It's exactly 84.
All content © 2005 Keith Law.