There’s more than one way to learn

Think back to your school days - what did your language classes look like?

For your mother tongue, maybe it was literature courses, or rhetoric. For me, it was called “Language Arts,” and we spent our time reading books, writing essays, and learning about metaphors and similes and other words that are impossible to spell in English (onomotopoeia? no, that can’t be right). It was a a space to use language in context to improve it.

Across the hall, in your foreign language courses, maybe things looked different.

Foreign language classes traditionally focus on the details of how to speak correctly, with rules that you can memorize and apply. You learn about gender or when to use the Future Anterior or the rules for declining and marking case - and then you’re tested on it. You take a quiz on ordinal numbers and when you write “threeth” instead of “third,” the red pen from the teacher tells you that you aren’t doing this right - you’re not good at languages.

But that can’t be true, since here you are, using languages in your every day life. Maybe what you struggle with is learning languages explicitly. And you’re in good company! In my language teaching methods courses, our professor shared that for about 95% of students, these traditional methods of rote memorization (drill and grill, as we called it) just don’t work for building fluency. Most studies agree:

Our brains have two different modes of learning that result in two different kinds of knowledge.

Those traditional language courses target the explicit system, which leverages our brain’s highly developed frontal lobes - the bit right behind your forehead.

When folks are asked to recall explicit knowledge, we see the front of the brain light in imaging studies, where memories are stored in constellations of neurons that activate together. Usually, language learning refers to this kind of explicit knowledge about languages.

Implicit learning, on the other hand, is something much more subtle. It happens gradually and without conscious awareness, with repeated exposure to patterns in the world. Implicit learning is much more primal and basic. We see that in brain scans, too: the resulting knowledge lives in the strength of connections between deeper brain structures like the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.

In language, we often have exactly this kind of intuitive sense of what’s right or wrong, but we can’t express that as a rule. What’s key, though, is that it doesn’t prevent us from using that knowledge (which is why you can speak your mother tongue without knowing what a gerund is). Another key aspect of implicit knowledge is that you aren’t guaranteed to get the right answer - you’re just more likely to. In the literature, gaining access to a language this way is called acquisition.

From hopkinsmedicine.org. The explicit memory system is primarily housed in the frontal lobe (in pink), while implicit memories are supported by the cerebellum ( in gray) and the basal ganglia, which are structures that are deeper inside the brain.

To operate in the world, we often need to combine both kinds of knowledge - take the scene from Schitt’s Creek where two David and Moira are trying to prepare a recipe. They have an instruction to “Fold in the cheese,” but they are lacking both the explicit knowledge (What does it mean to “fold cheese in”? You might know, but now know how to do it) and the implicit knowledge (what does the batter look like when the cheese is mixed in? what is the arm technique that’s needed? There’s no need to know the name of it to do it!) to complete the task.

Image from IMDB

Since these two different types of knowledge use two different parts of our brain, you may be wondering how information transfers between them. That’s the tricky bit - we don’t actually know how (or even if!) that happens. It may be that by practicing some explicit knowledge enough, we can establish implicit knowledge patterns. Maybe there’s another pathway between the two systems. The science is still out.

But we do know one thing: The explicit system takes a long time to develop; our frontal brains don’t fully mature until we are in our late 20s or so. So when your little one is coming up to speed on their first language, we know that they’re acquiring it.

That’s why the activities and strategies that we talk about here at Little Language Labs are all targeted at making acquisition easier - we want to help you facilitate that implicit learning for your little one as much as possible!