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Automatic Language Growth: The Story So Far

Beyond Language Learning’s YouTube channel is up with its first video. In about seven minutes it tells the story of the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) approach and the unique AUA Thai Program, describing how they may upend common beliefs about language learning in adulthood and represent the future of language learning. Enjoy!

The Automatic Language Growth page on this site features the script of the video and will eventually include and link to more detailed background information and research. For now you can watch the video and read this synopsis:

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Creating, Coaching, Consulting, and Continuing Beyond Language Learning: An Update

It’s been a while! The last time I posted to this blog was almost three years ago, back in July 2020.

I’ve been planning to start posting again, and I think it’s about time I shared an update. In this post, I’ll discuss:

Why I stopped posting: Discouragement, being busy, and taking action on what I’ve written about language acquisition
What I’ve been doing: My projects related to improving language learning: creating content, coaching, and consulting
Why I’ve decided to start posting again: Focusing on what I can do best, growing interest in topics on this blog, and responding to technological advances

Finally, I have a few words if you’ve tried to contact me before, have been in touch, or were thinking about reaching out.

Answering a Reader’s Questions about the ALG Approach and Language Acquisition

A Beyond Language Learning reader has emailed me with some good questions about second language acquisition, comprehensible input, and the Automatic Language Growth approach. I’ve decided to post my answers here, as I’m sure other readers will have similar questions. I answered each question much like an interview, with the things that first came to mind, and then edited it. These answers should be taken as some of my thoughts on each question and not the final word. There’s much more I could say about any of them.

What led you to follow the ALG method?

Having grown up monolingual, as an adult I became interested in how adults could reach very high levels of ability in second languages. I discovered ALG and it interested me because of its claim that adults can pick up new languages like children, without conscious effort, and approach native-like abilities, and its theory that it’s how we learn languages that matters far more than when.

I returned to university to study psychology and linguistics and examine the research on second language acquisition in light of these ideas. I was surprised to find that there wasn’t any research that really tested ALG theory, for example by having adults learn languages more like children over extended periods of time by having them learn implicitly without forcing speaking and so on.

Given both this lack of research, and my interest in the possibility of being able to pick up a new language to very high levels of ability as an adult, I wanted to try out the ALG approach and experience it for myself to see what would happen.

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Creating More Comprehensible Input While Getting Comprehensible Input

When acquiring languages through comprehensible input, how can we help others acquire languages in the process? Here’s one thing I’ve been doing.

In my post on the first anniversary of this blog, Beyond Language Learning, I wrote how one of my intentions is not just to acquire new languages myself, but to do it in ways that will make language acquisition easier and more accessible to other people.

One small way that I’m doing this right now is with a project that might help other people acquire a language as I acquire one, and even enhance my own language acquisition in doing so.

I’m sharing it here because I’m interested in what other possibilities there may be for helping other people acquire a language in the process of acquiring a language oneself, and I hope that it can inspire other people to try similar things.

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Creating Comprehensible Input Videos for Beginning English Learners

They say that it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, and that you should be the change you wish to see in the world.

I’ve written a lot about the lack of content that presents languages in ways that make them understandable so that even beginning learners can just watch, listen, and pick up languages efficiently without study, practice, or translation.

Experts widely agree that exposure to a new language in ways that you can understand what is being said—known as comprehensible input—is critical to acquiring the language and becoming fluent in it.

Yet decades after linguist Stephen Krashen popularized the concept of comprehensible input, for practically any given language, there is still very little material that lower-level adult learners can easily understand without added study or instruction.

This kind of comprehensible input seems to be so rare that I had to go halfway around the world to the unique AUA Thai Program in Bangkok in order to find it in abundance.

For a long time I’ve complained about the lack of comprehensible input and lamented the opportunities silently lost because of it.

Now I’ve decided to do something about it.

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How Can We Learn to Speak a Language without Speaking It?

Answering questions from readers about applying the ALG approach—acquiring a language by listening to comprehensible input—with tutors and language exchange partners

In my last post I described the language exchange method that polyglot and language instructor Jeff Brown has explained and demonstrated in a couple of popular YouTube videos.

With his method, you pick up a language from partners or tutors who speak it by having them speak it to you in ways that you can understand, such as by using actions, describing pictures, and telling stories using illustrated children’s books.

I wrote about how the method provides a way to acquire a language following the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) approach, which at present is only being used in one program to teach one language—the AUA Thai Program.

Both ALG and Brown’s approach are based on Dr. Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis, which says we acquire languages by listening, not by speaking, and that we subconsciously learn to use them correctly and fluently by getting comprehensible input—hearing them in ways that we can understand—not by studying and practicing things like grammar rules.

The main difference with the ALG approach is that it advocates delaying producing the target language until it emerges naturally, without trying.

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How to Acquire a Language with Tutors and Exchanges, and Speak It Like a Native Speaker

A pair of inspiring videos provides a method for picking up a language without study through comprehensible input. Just listening when first using it and speaking one’s own language can lead to more native-like abilities, and let people acquire each other’s languages together.

When I first learned about Automatic Language Growth (ALG), I wanted to acquire a language by following this unique approach, but I didn’t know how.

ALG theory suggests that adults can effortlessly learn languages as well as young children do when they learn them like children: picking them up through listening and understanding without conscious study or practice.

However, I couldn’t find any classes that taught a language like the AUA Thai Program, where ALG has mainly been applied.

This means teaching the language by speaking it in ways that students can understand it at their level, using non-verbal communication as needed, without adding things like translation or speaking practice.

I also couldn’t find any content that was suited to this kind of approach, such as videos in a foreign language that are both highly understandable and interesting for adults who are just beginning to learn it.

How then could I acquire a language the way I wanted to?

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How “Parallel Structure” Can Enhance Comprehensible Input with More Meaningful Repetition of Language

In a recent post I wrote about how meaningful repetition of language can help provide comprehensible input (CI) to language learners and support acquisition.

Meaningful repetition helps learners acquire new language, both by increasing their comprehension through adding redundancy to the input and by increasing their number of understandable encounters with words and structures.

I talked a lot about the power of the circling technique, where a teacher makes a statement in the target language and then asks their students various kinds of questions based on what they just said.

Since that post, a friend has alerted me to another way of providing a lot of meaningful repetition of language.

He finds it so useful for acquiring language that he calls it “the crown jewel of comprehensible input”.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I can certainly see how powerful it can be.

We could call this technique the use of parallel structure.

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Starving for Comprehensible Input

Could the lack of interesting and understandable content explain a common behaviour among language learners?

A desert scene to depict a lack of comprehensible input today

A good friend not long ago remarked that he’s “starving for comprehensible input”—opportunities to hear the language he’s learning in ways that are both highly interesting and highly understandable at his level.

He lives in Bangkok, just a few stops away from a one-of-a-kind program that provides hundreds of hours of Thai input in ways even beginners can understand no matter their first language, but a busy schedule keeps him from going there.

He occasionally takes lessons with a Thai tutor who understands the importance of comprehensible input, but is also too busy to do much about it—booked solid with students who demand not to hear a lot of Thai in understandable ways, but rather, to get explanations of how the language works and how to say things in it.

Second language acquisition research shows that we acquire languages and become fluent in them not through study and practice of words and grammar rules, but through massive comprehensible input.

So where is all the comprehensible input?

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Freedom to Play

As someone who’s interested in advancing research on second language acquisition to help people better learn languages, I think that a careful and rigorous scientific approach is tremendously important.

Good research of lasting value involves carefully planned studies and experiments that require the investment of a lot of time, money, and human resources—not things that can be thrown together on a whim.

At the same time, I think there’s enormous value in also being able to research and experiment in a much more informal way: through unbounded play with language acquisition.

The ability to try out many things spontaneously can help us break away from preconceived notions and generate new insights, and this can ultimately lead to better research questions and better formal studies.

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Abundant Compelling Comprehensible Input: What We’re Aiming For, and How to Get There

There’s no shortage of compelling things to communicate in every language. The challenge is having people make them highly comprehensible even to those who don’t yet know their language at all.

In order to acquire new languages as effectively, efficiently, enjoyably, and effortlessly as possible, the most important thing is to have an abundance of compelling comprehensible input at every level.

Compelling comprehensible input means being able to hear the language you’re learning in ways that are both highly interesting and highly understandable to you.

Unfortunately, although we have both the technology and human resources to create it in abundance today, compelling comprehensible input remains needlessly scarce.

This is especially the case for total beginners, but it’s true for every level of learner, all the way up to advanced.

This blog, Beyond Language Learning, is about creating a world where compelling comprehensible input is available in abundance to every language learner.

You’re reading this, I hope, because you too are interested in the same kind of goal, thinking about how to get there, and perhaps even working already to build that world.

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