Technology and language acquisition

Technology and language acquisition

I set out to write this after attending a webinar on games in language learning. The talk simply brought to the fore the issue of language learning assisted by technology.

I have been mulling over the implications of using “smart” devices in learning languages for some time now. The issue is, I feel, intricately linked with the question of whether technology affects, modifies, the way the brain works in acquiring language. I haven’t seen any research published on the topic, though there may well be some and it is simply drowned in the sea of online publications.

I am no expert at neurolinguistics – my knowledge amounts to what I was taught ages ago at university and my non-expert pursuit of the discipline throughout my teaching career. However, as an experienced teacher, I do know that there are as many approaches to language learning as learners. For the sake of illustration, I will mention an extreme (?)example of mother tongue interference. In my mother tongue the letter “a” is often a prefix which means “without”. I was once astounded to hear a student of mine interpreting an initial “a” in an English word as a negative prefix. And of course, there have been countless other individual instances of transferring mother tongue or second foreign language rules and generalisations to English(first foreign language most of the times). Add all these complications to the unique way our brains are wired, and you have enough challenges to last you many lifetimes!

At the core of my ramifications lies the overarching question: does or can technology bring about structural changes in the brain which could have a profound influence on how learners approach a foreign language?

Here is where games come into it. While attending the webinar about online games, it occurred to me for the umpteenth time that most of what is used online is a replication of good old conventional material in a digital form. At the risk of being called old-fashioned and technophobic, I would argue that when it comes to games, I mostly prefer the non-digital version. No digital alternative can rival the satisfaction drawn from using a real board with counters, dice and all in class. I am indeed urging a return to “traditional” games where we teachers can share with our students the joy or disappointment, as the case might be, of handling the dice and moving our counters forward or back.

But I am rambling on, and it is time I got back to the main issue: how does technology affect foreign language learning if, on the face of it, it doesn’t bring about structural changes in the brain?

Here, I am cautioning the reader that this is the conclusion of my teaching experience and careful observation of hundreds of learners rather than a theory I could back up with science.

The answer might be that many learners who were and possibly still are not favoured by the exclusive use of grammar rules and translation in order to learn a foreign language now have unlimited access to real language – spoken and written – thanks to the web. They can therefore follow the reverse process of gathering what is acceptable or not in the language through their exposure to it rather than sweating to apply rules to every single utterance they produce. Needless to say, the role of the teacher lies in guiding the students through by selecting and grading this enormous input at our and their fingertips so that they can get onto and stay on the fast track to language acquisition.