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Hi. Today I want to talk about the idea of the language parent.
Recently I got a letter from Stephen Krashen; Professor Stephen Krashen, and he sent me through an article, and this article talked about a concept that I came up with in 2006; and that’s the concept of the language parent. I’ve talked about the language parent in The Third Ear quite a lot, in some detail in terms of: how do you use it, and what its characteristics are.
So, what is a language parent? In order to really understand this idea, you need to think back to what it was like when you were a child, communicating with your parents. And, as you reflect on that, you’ll notice that there were certain patterns of communication; certain rules of the interaction. For a start, when children are talking to their parents; parents are not always correcting what the children say.
When you’re starting to learn your mother tongue, there’s going to be lots and lots of places where you’re inaccurate, right to the point that someone who’s not familiar with you, really is not going to understand what you’re saying. Lots of kids are not understood when they speak to adults who are not their parents. But the really good thing is; because your parents are used to understanding you, they know what you say quite a lot, they’re used to your patterns, then they understand what you’re saying. So as a child, when you open your mouth and speak, you’re able to have a communication impact. And, because you’re able to have a communication impact, that gives you appropriate feedback and encouragement.
Now, of course during this process, sometimes your parent is going to say to you: “did you mean this?” or, “did you mean that?” So this gives the child a chance to be corrected, but as they’re getting this correction and this information, it’s done without criticising the child and at the same time the child is getting a really good model. And because the child the child’s getting a good model of what to say, then naturally and consciously the child picks up the unconscious rules of the language. In Chinese that’s: yu-gan (语感).
Also, what’s really important is parents talk about the same stories to children, or the same things over and over again. So children get a chance to hear the same content many, many, many times. And so, through this multiple repetition, they’re hearing the English, or the mother tongue, more and more. Now, think about this: this sort of communication actually creates a perfect comprehensible input environment. Children’s attention is going naturally to the communication effect of what they’re doing, and as a result, the language itself is acquired unconsciously. Now, a language parent for a child is exactly the same as an idea for a language parent for you as an adult. It’s somebody who is interested in you as a person, and they’re really willing to spend a lot of time communicating with you. They don’t want to be your teacher. Remember this: teachers think that they know more than you do, and their intention is to correct what you’re saying. A language parent doesn’t want to correct you. They just want to communicate with you a lot. They want to, over and over again, talk about the same things with you. And they also are very willing to understand what you’re saying when you’re saying it. Even if you’re saying something that most other people would not understand, and this is very, very important.
Professor Krashen told me that in 1961, when he was in Vienna, his landlady was his language parent. His landlady was a very, very nice lady who loved to talk, spend lots and lots of time talking to Professor Krashen, and she was always telling him the same stories. These stories never changed, they were always the same stories, so Stephen Krashen got to hear these stories over and over again, and as a result of that he was able to learn his German. When I was learning Chinese, I also had a language parent. This was an artist, a painter, in Beijing, and I went to his place almost every day and he’d be there chattering away about the subjects and topics that were interesting to him. And because of this I very, very quickly was able to get a really good handle on the core of Chinese. Because of that, once I had that core, then I was able to interact with more and more people.
Because of this principle of the language parent, as you’re learning English it would be really important for you to create a situation where you have a language parent. And I want to warn you, you absolutely do not want to get someone who wants to teach you. You want to find somebody who wants to communicate with you. And this is the only way that you’re going to create a natural, comprehensible input environment. Now the Kung-Fu English system is also designed around comprehensible input, especially as it meets the conditions of giving the same stories over and over again from different angles, so that you have to same sort of content but many, many repetitions in slightly different forms. We also provide language coaches, and the role of the language coach is actually to act as a language parent, and to create a comprehensible input environment for the learners. And this satisfies the conditions of the unconscious acquisition of the language, because you’ve got a comprehensible input environment.
Remember: comprehensible input is an absolutely critical component of learning English well, or any language for that matter. And a language parent can help you create a really, really good comprehensible input environment.
Wishing you all the best in your English learning.
