i + 1

My friend doesn’t want me to launch this blog. He says I’ve got more to offer the world than just language learning tips. Perhaps he’s right. However, it’s got me thinking...Comprehensible input-based learning has been shown to be the only effective way to learn language. But what if it was the only effective way to learn anything ? Is that even a meaningful concept?

What would be the implications for say, learning to cook, or learning to play tennis, or learning to be a top athlete, or learning to fly a plane or helicopter, or learning to code?

What if, for every skill we wish to develop, we must first develop our “{skill}” brain. In learning a language, for example; French, we now know the way to success is to develop our “French brain”, and then french linguistic skills will emerge!

Can that be applied to say, learning to cook? Learning to do maths? Actually, I think it’s fair to say that maths is already an i + 1 (*) exercise. Um. Sorry, excuse the pun. I mean, it’s an exercise in slowly increasing the complexity in line with the students increasing understanding.

(*) For those who may not have caught the reference, Dr Krashen often refers to his Comprehensible Input theory of language learning as the “i+1” method.

For me, learning to fly an R/C helicopter was a difficult task, because it required learning to control 4-different axis of control at the same time. If my focus was on any less than all four input controls, the heli would begin to crash. I HAD to be active on all 4 control inputs simultaneously, and constantly. Sound difficult? It is. But when you start you get specially wide landing gear. You take baby steps. Increasing thrust until the heli feels light. It starts to drift, you try to correct. If you correct the wrong way, or use the wrong control-stick, you dump the throttle and the wide-landing gear protects the heli from a crash. You (and your heli) lives to try again. Thus, the first level, is simply: know where the kill switch is: if in trouble, close the throttle. Next is learning to keep the heli in position, even though it will want to skid all around (and rotate). Once you can keep the heli still (whilst lightly touching the ground), but not drifting anywhere, you can try lifting off the ground a few inches. It gets harder. But again, if you get in trouble, you kill the throttle and rely on the wide landing gear to save the day.

I could go on. But the point here, is that there are no theory-of-flight lessons. No aerodynamics. Just rev up the engine and start feeling your way to acquiring a new skill. And then, as each required skill is gained, a new level of difficulty is unlocked. So, I did all this, and now I can fly. But how did I acquire this skill? What happened to my brain?

Do you know that many super-fast touch typists would actually struggle to tell you where a particular key was. It would often take a moment. And you know what they do if the answer didn’t come right away? They’d ask their hands! They’d mime out typing that letter - and their hands would automatically flinch the correct motion, and they’d go, “oh yeah, it’s there”.

The helicopter and the typist stories are trying to make a point - the skills we develop, get their own micro-processing sub-tree inside our brain. Effectively a mini-brain, inside our brain, whose job it is to be able to process that situation and deal with it effectively. For example, once the typing-mini-brain has been trained to type, the outer brain (the rest of the brain outside of the typing-mini-brain) stops caring where the keys are. After a while, the outer brain does the most efficient thing and simply forgets where they are. The typing-mini-brain will take care of that typing task now - because it has developed it’s own more-direct connections to the movements required to type the letters required. Fast typists type from 12 to 20 chapters per second. That’s simply way too fast to do consciously. It's the same for all the corrections required to fly an r/c helicopter. The number of constant and simultaneous inputs required to keep the heli flying simply can’t be done consciously - that would simply be way to slow, and the helicopter would forever be crashing!

So, when we need to be able to handle a complex task, we first need to develop a “mini-brain” that will dedicated to handle that task. We need to train it. And usually, once that training is complete - or at least sufficiently advanced - the main, outer brain, get back to doing it’s usual stuff. This is why, just like the fast typists, r/c flyers often have that same sense, that they don’t really know what their hands do anymore - they just give the command. Eg. Fly that way, and it happens... like magic... because the dedicated mini brain takes over. Once the training is done, we’re now controlling the mini-brain via a much more simplified interface. Not because we’re smart! But because our brain is! At least it appears so. In actuality, the neural connections that were built in training - the SLOW MANUAL controllers that allowed us to give feedback to the mini-brain during training, are no longer necessary. The mini-brain is able to pick up the task by itself, and the “training connections” fade. Those neural pathways fade. It’s brilliant because that way the brain doesn’t bother wasting itself maintaining connections it doesn’t use. It self-optimises! Really cool huh!

So where are we now. We now have this concept of a task-specific mini brain. In the case of learning French (which I am), I call it my French brain. But it’s really just a mini-brain - a dedicated sub-tree inside my brain whose purpose is to understand French.
So really, we have these mini-brains for all sorts of things. Such as....
- a French brain
- a driving brain
- a typing brain
- a r/c helicopter brain
- an I/T brain
- a tennis brain
- a cooking brain
- and so on.

And in each case, the purpose of each mini-brain is to allow my outer brain to not have to deal with the details required. In computer programming parlance. We train a sub-module, then one the sub-module is trained, the training-wheels come off (fade), and the interface self-optimises. Congratulations to us, we have just added to our repertoire, another task which is handled by our, dare-I-say; subconscious. Leaving our conscious brain to get back to our day to day life. Awesome.

Dr Krashen says, when we experience i+1 comprehensible input, we are actually learning subconsciously. The mistake of skills-based training, when it comes to language learning, is that we not actually adding a new sub-module to be trained. Instead, all of this conscious training, is being fed into an existing sub-module - our English Brain. Our english brain (or our mother tongue) is going to be extremely optimised to handle english. I doubt we could ever throw enough of another language at it to break it down. But trying to train another language, in the same sub tree, is going to be very painful and confusing. Actually, I think there are studies that show, that you actually can, to a degree, sacrifice your mother tongue in the efforts to learn a new language - it usually happens to migrants arriving in say an English speaking country, where their mother tongue is not valued.

But since we can learn to do many things, such as; drive, type, fly toys, play tennis, cook and so on, I don’t see why, instead of sacrificing one language for another, why dont we simply develop a new sub-brain. We just needed to know how and why. Dr Krashen has already given us the how. I’m giving you the why (why it works), and why it’s the only way. Languages can have similarities. But in reality, they are far too different to simply bolt one onto another. And that’s exactly what you’re trying to do if you do grammer drills, or learn vocabulary. Because WHERE exactly are you putting this new information in your brain, if you haven’t started a separate mini-brain for this new language?

For example, let’s say you learnt that the word for “tree” in French is arbre. Now, in your English brain, you have an new data point: A “tree” is also known as an arbre. But when you try to listen to French, or when you try to speak French, where will you draw your skills from? From english! Arbre is sitting in your English brain, and you’re trying to overlay a French framework. Your trying to build French ON TOP OF your English framework. Your brain will be so confused. What you’re really doing is like memorising poems. Except that the poem is in French. So great,  you can recite the poem. But it’s still just tied back to the English, so you don’t actually know French. You just know a few French words that match some English ones....because it’s all sitting in your English brain.

Now imagine you start some French training in TRPS. The stories are told completely in French. But instead of being lost, like you expected, you find there is enough in the telling of the story - the gestures, the facial expressions, the pictures - that you get the gist of it. WITHOUT A WORD OF ENGLISH BEING SPOKEN. What is your brain going to do with this... this...? this message. It’s not English. It doesn’t belong there. It’s not driving. Or any other skill you have. So your brain parks it somewhere new. Congratulations. You have just created a new skills branch in your brain. But importantly: concepts that will grow in this language-processing-tree, will have their own back-end connections to the underlying objects. This is because when your brain got the gist of some of those things, it creates some connections directly back to those underlying objects. Links that can be strengthened over time. Links that can be fleshed out with cultural information because of the way that information FLOWS to you in this new and strange language.

SO instead of arbre being linked to “tree”, which is then linked to our concept of a tree, this new mini-brain will establish a node for arbre, and it will be directly linked to our concept of a “tree”. Because ENGLISH WAS NEVER PART OF THE INPUT PROCESS. So the brain never had a need to link the english word to the French word. It only had a need to link the French word to the concept. And as I showed earlier, our brains will not create connections, or keep connections, unless we use and reinforce them. The connection between the english word “Tree” and the French word “arbre”, if it gets created at all, will likely only exist during the training phase. After that, it will probably fade.

Note also, that just like a good typist who can’t immediately tell you where the keys are, a multi-lingual person can sometimes have trouble translating something. For one, some things just don’t translate well. But inside our brains, they don’t need to. Our French brain handles the French side of things. Our English brain handles the english side of things. In a developed multilingual speaker, the training ties will be all faded, and the pathways to produce a translation will be the slow CONSCIOUS ones. Unless of course they are a professional translator, but that’s a subject for another time!

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As a footnote. I will say that before I started this blog, I trained French on DuoLingo for nearly two years. DuoLingo really does require you to learn grammar and vocabulary as you go, AND it does encourage you to start speaking very early on. Things I now know to be not desirable. So I really don’t think I was able to plant the seeds of a “French brain”. However, in my earlier efforts with French TPRS, I have noticed that what I picked up during my time with DuoLingo seems to operating as a kind of internal guide for me. Like a built in translater - but only of individual words. Which during TPRS, seems to help. Time may tell if this is actually more help or hindrance! I think I have contaminated my English brain with French, but for now it’s helping me build my French brain, and after that, well, the brain will self-optimise (meaning, the French bolted into my English brain will likely fade) so I suspect it will be just fine.

How it all started - Your Spanish Brain

So there I was trying to tell my dad about Stephen Krashner’s theory of language acquisition, without sounding too technical, or too complicated, or too confident (comes off as arrogent, I’m told), when I suddenly found myself saying: you need to develop your Spanish brain. (My dad wants to learn Spanish, of course).

Spanish brain. Spanish brain. My mind was thinking it through. It makes a lot of sense. Stephen Krashner never mentioned the term, but then, he’s didn’t write “The brain that changes itself” either. I would be very interested to hear a review of Stephen Krashner’s language acquisition theory from a neurology specialist! For now, I would like to speculate on it myself.

Brains are certainly mysterious things. But we (meaning those scientists) have slowly been figuring it out. They have theories about how the brain acquires new memories. About why we often have trouble associating names (aural) and faces (visual). About how we see, and how we’re able to react so blindly fast with such an apparently slow (clock-speed-wise) brain. We know about split personalities, and just the general way the brain stores information - it’s not at all like a computer’s data bank, but rather far more haphazard.

So why is that relevant here? Because to me, these things point to the idea that the language we acquire is stored in amongst the very things it represents. When we think “tree”, we instinctively bring up an image of a tree. Well it’s kind of a tree. If you think about it, it’s probably not a specific tree. It’s probably not even specific at all. It’s just linked to this concept of “tree” we have buried in our brain.

Some have talked about the problem with modern language teaching as follows: 

(and I will be making the assumption that English is our native language for the sake of convenience)

Associating new words with our established English words is a terrible way to acquire a new language. The resulting recall-pathways are likely to be convoluted and our new language likely will be contaminated by English grammar mechanisms.

The problem here being that we are trying to overlay the new language, on top of the existing language. The new language then only lives a kind of half-life, having to have so much translation occur through the filter of our first language. This juxtaposition of the new language on top of the old, means the new language will always struggle to break free of the first language. From a brain perspective, there is simply little chance of the new language forming it’s own language-tree in the brain.

What’s a “language tree in the brain”? By this, I mean the build up of neurons and connections in the brain that enable us to comprend the new language. In the case of English, we have already built up our tree, with it’s connections to all the things we know, and all the (built-in) rules we have acquired. In other words, the grammar of the language is part of that tree. It is part of our knowledge and use of english. And because of the brain’s storage system, it’s not stored in one place...it’s stored all over the place. Bits here and there. Hey it works. That’s not a problem. The point is we cant simply come climbing in over that English-tree and add a new language. Not unless that language has EXACTLY the same grammar and usage mechanisms (not bloody likely).

Ergo. You can’t build up a new language on top of your first language. You have to build up a new language tree in your brain, with it’s own DIRECT connections to the things you know. And in building up that language tree, separately to your English language tree, it will  automatically incorporate the structure - the GRAMMAR - of that language as it builds! Just like it did when we first learnt English!

This is where I think what I mentioned earlier about Scientists understanding the nature of Split-personalities comes into play. A split personality can occur where an event (usually traumatic) occurs and results in new branch in the mind/memory. One that the person doesn’t want. And as such, they start to develop a duality in their brain - with new events either being attached to the “bad” branch, if they are in that mood/state, or the “good” (un-infected-by the bad event) branch. Over time, these two branches/states grow. But can lose inter-connectivity simply because occurring events are predominantly stored in one branch or the other, depending on the state-of-mind at the time. Eventually, the states lose so much inter-connectivity, that they can become entirely separate personalities. Think of it like this: a brain’s neuro-connectively has an incredible maze-like complexity...but a split-personality is like two separate mazes mashed together into the same storage space. But following the threads (connections) of one, wont lead to the other, and vice-versa.

Now think of the language tree for English in your head. We don’t want to try to bolt-on a new language on that tree. We want to build a new tree. Am I saying that learning a new language (correctly) results in a new language tree forming in our brain. Yes! Will that result in a split personality? Well, not really. It’s not quite the same thing. But in a sense, yes, we could possibly develop a differing personality when we speak one language instead of another, based on the way that language tree has developed - eg. What events, good, bad etc we encountered as we were building that language tree. But more likely I expect there would be a fair amount of cross-connectivity between your English “brain” and your other-language “brain”.  Even if it did occur so what (differing personality depending on what language you spoke), a split personality is an extreme example and requires very (rare) specific conditions. The idea here is simply to understand the concept and how it applies to language learning.

To be honest, I would love to hear from bilingual or multilingual speakers about their experiences and whether they feel they have much in the way of differing personalities depending on which language they are speaking.