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!

——
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.