Native language skills as a foundation for foreign language learning

Full text

Wolfgang Butzkamm
Native Language Skills as a Foundation for Foreign Language
Learning
(In: Wolf Kindermann (ed.), Transcending boundaries. Essays in honour of
Gisela Hermann-Brennecke. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007, 71 - 85.)
Le langage comme faculté ne se construit qu'une fois dans une vie humaine.
(DALGALIAN 25)
The Theory in a Nutshell
The allergy to the presence of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom has
undoubtedly come from its all-too-frequent misuse. While it is, therefore,
understandable that experts are squeamish about acknowledging the essential,
overwhelmingly positive contribution of the mother tongue, their attitude has been a
barrier to the true understanding of the issues involved.
It has always been good educational practice to build on a learner's existing skills and
competencies. Why should foreign language teaching be an exception? The prevailing
monolingual methodology seems to assume that children have to learn everything about
the foreign language from scratch. But by the time they start with foreign languages at
school, children know a lot about language. As they grow into their mother tongue (1)
they have learnt to conceptualize their world and have fully grasped the symbolic
function of language; (2) they have learnt to communicate; (3) they have learnt to use
their voice and to speak; (4) they have acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar
and have become aware of many of the finer points of language; (5) they have acquired
the secondary skills of reading and writing. The mother tongue is therefore the greatest
asset people bring to the task of foreign language learning and provides an
indispensable Language Acquisition Support System.
By contrast, monolingual orthodoxy seems to assume that the mother tongue is
nothing but a constant source of interference. Keeping it out of the foreign language

learning business would mean we could more or less start out with something like a
blank, structureless slate reserved for foreign languages.
What Early Developments Promote Foreign Language Learning?
1. We are not born speaking, but we are creatures born to learn speaking. One and a half
year old children have grasped the essence of language, its symbolic function. They
have come to understand their caretakers as well as themselves as intentional, mental
agents. Two-year-olds have learnt to use phrases and words as carriers of
communicative intent, and can represent their experiences in words. In repetitive, highly
structured routine situations that soon became transparent to them, they have learnt to
map meanings onto phrases and words, and get thoughts from head to head. Speech
sounds are not funny noises to them any more, perhaps they never were.
No child starts a second language with a clean slate. It's already been written on. By
the time they come into our classrooms, they have concepts and words for whole arenas
of experience, food, clothing, family and playmates, school and holidays, plants and
animals, television, hobbies and pastimes, and, last but not least, number. Languages
permeate culture, they are distillations of generations of human experience. Take
football. All the foreign language teacher has to do is give the new words for well-
known concepts such as goal, penalty-kick or offside. Likewise, we quite naturally
assume that our pupils already know what words such as "birthday" and "postman"
mean within their own culture before they set about explaining the words
"anniversaire/Geburtstag" or "facteur/Postbote." Consider how often a child will have
celebrated birthdays, or seen a postman. Even if we deal with cultures that restrict the
concept of birthday to the day of one's birth, the MT word would still be a suitable
starting point for comprehension. Rather than re-conceptualise the world, we need to
extend our concepts, with any necessary cultural adjustment or refinement.
This is some part of the common ground pupils and teachers share, and which
teachers quite naturally use for their monolingual explanations. These wouldn't work if
there weren't those common ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the world. It is
precisely our common sense knowledge that computers cannot yet cope with and which

prevents them from "understanding" simple texts and translating them adequately: ropes
are for pulling and not for pushing, trees die at the very place they grew up at, winds can
blow leaves from trees, etc. Conceptually, then, most teaching texts are a well-known
landscape, but dressed in the disguise of a new language. This is at least true for all
those teaching situations where there are no profound culture clashes or differences in
natural environments, the fauna and flora. But even when a kiss means rubbing your
nose against somebody's cheek, one simply has to extend a concept which is already
familiar.
Wilkins (1978, 19) attacks the idea that in learning another language,
part of the task is that of attaching fresh labels to familiar things and ideas. This is as
mistaken a notion about vocabulary as it is about syntax, since our classification of the
physical and abstract world is itself determined by the lexical structure of the language
we speak. If we learn a new language, we have to learn a new way of classifying things.
This is bad linguistics and armchair didactics. Clearly, it's the linguistic determinism
hypothesis which is at the back of Wilkins's mind, and which Whorf (1956, 213) stated
in its strongest form:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages […] the world is
presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds
– and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.
Different languages do cut up the colour domain differently, and some languages have
more basic colour terms than others, some have more words for snow etc. But the fact
that a language does or doesn't have a word (or new word-stem) for a colour or a
particular kind of snow means little. We cannot enter here into the debate on the
relationship of language and thought, tempting as it would be, but claim that this has no
bearing on the question whether meaning should be clarified in the native language or in
the target language. Let Wilkins (1978, 20f.) explain his idea himself:
A simple example will make the point clear. Russian has one verb, hoditj, which means
go on foot and another, jezditj, which means to travel by vehicle, but no 'neutral' verb like

'go' which can be used for either […] Neither of these words can be properly understood
without knowledge of the meaning of the other.
This is a non sequitur – the misleading Saussurian tradition that language is a self-
contained and self-referential system where words are defined by their relationship to
other words. It is simply false to equate language with thought. We believe that children
all over the world will have no problems with the concept of going on foot. What's
wrong then with explaining "hoditj" as "walk" or "go on foot" and wait till the other
verb comes along? The language learning process is always cumulative.
2. From birth on, children are learning how to communicate, first non-verbally, and
about a year later, verbally. Entry into language is preceded by entry into
communication. Parents play a far more active role than just being an indispensable
source of language input. They are first of all partners in communication, trying to make
their own intentions clear and interpreting their children's vocalisations as being
intentional and meaningful responses, even before they become so. Infants participate
and will become themselves intention-readers. They will come to understand how
gesture, gaze, facial expressions, voice quality and actual speech sounds can combine to
achieve communicative effects. They will learn how to participate in conversations, how
to attend to interlocutors and to whatever is being talked about, how to stay on a topic,
how to tailor their utterances for each addressee. They will learn when they are expected
to respond, what counts as a turn in conversation, and that there is usually more than
one way of making oneself understood. They can eavesdrop on other people's
conversations and join an ongoing conversation so that the conversation continues on
topic. They know that one speaks differently to friends and family members from the
way one does to teachers and strangers. They have an idea of politeness and rudeness,
and they are busy constructing their social role as a boy versus as a girl partly through
language.
Thus learners have acquired an L1 along with its attendant discourse skills and
pragmatic knowledge which are directly available for incorporation into the target
language system. This is far from saying that as they approach school age, children are

skilled conversationalists in their MT. For instance, 10-year-olds use discourse particles
such as "in fact," "nevertheless," "although," "on the other hand," which serve to take
the listener's knowledge and perspective into account, three times more often than 6-
year-olds but still much less often than adults (TOMASELLO (2003), 269). Relating past
events and story-telling are complex discourse skills that take long to develop, continue
into the school years and beyond and can be turned into an art-form. Although the
foundations have been laid, and 6-year-olds evidence practically adult-level linguistic
skills in many respects, there is much left for school to do.
3. To some extent, we are born communicators, but we must certainly learn how to
speak. Children have to practise becoming vocalizers and speakers.
Fluent articulation is probably man's most complex motor skill. It involves the
coordinated use of approximately 100 muscles, such that speech sounds are produced at a
rate of about 15 per second. (LEVELT (1989), 413)
It comes as no surprise that during all of childhood, children are at work on becoming
better articulators.
When babies lie in their crib and play with sounds as they coo and babble, they are
likely to create "a kind of mouth-to-sound map, relating the movements of their speech
articulators (their lips, tongue, mouth and jaw) to the sounds they produce" (GOPNIK et
al. (2001), 124). They also learn something akin to lip-reading, as they watch their
mothers bending over them and speaking to them, just at the right distance for the
baby's not fully developed sight. Sometimes they get especially well-formed,
exaggerated and lengthened vowels from their parents:
When mothers say the word bead to an adult, it's produced in a fraction of a second and
it's a bit sloppy. But when mothers say that same word to their infants, it becomes beeeed,
a well-produced, clearly articulated word. (GOPNIK et al. (2001), 130)
Of course, parents are not consciously teaching vowels. Extraordinarily good vowels are
just part of their high-pitched melodic singsong which is an expression of their love, and

which they intuitively think makes them attractive to their baby and would endear them
to him. For them, it is simply a way of showing their affection and giving comfort. But
for the baby, it could be a great help in identifying the prototypical main vowels. Out of
context, motherese simply sounds silly. All this has been clearly demonstrated beyond
doubt by a spate of ingenious experiments carried out in the last few decades. For
instance, tests have shown that babies prefer motherese over ordinary language even
when the speaker is talking in a foreign language. Or they have shown that they prefer
to look at the face of a person mouthing a vowel that matches the one they are listening
to, rather than looking at a face mouthing a different vowel that doesn't match. Just as
babies are programmed for language, adults are designed to help babies learn:
"genetische Doppelsicherung der Sprache" (BUTZKAMM & BUTZKAMM (2004),106).
So children gradually and continually add more and more information about sound
production. They start out slowly with only a few mutilated, yet recognizable words.
They learn how to master the contrasts between high and low, front and back vowels,
between stops and fricatives, voiced and voiceless consonants etc. The continuous
experimentation and practice with the sounds of words takes time. Late acquired sounds
such as the "hushing" and "hissing" sounds are clearly more difficult than those
acquired early.
At some point there is a characteristic mismatch between what children perceive as
correct and what they can produce. This is often referred to as the "fis phenomenon":
One of us, for instance, spoke to a child who called his inflated plastic fish a fis. In
imitation of the child's pronunciation, the observer said: "This is your fis?" "No," said the
child, "my fis." He continued to reject the adult's pronunciation until he was told, "This is
your fish." "Yes," he said, "my fis." (BERKO & BROWN (1960), 531).
So the child is clearly aware of the contrast which it can't yet produce himself, and
rejects his own pronunciation when it comes from someone else. This fact was already
observed and commented upon by Stern & Stern (1928, 165). Perception is in advance
of articulation. The fine motor movements required for speech production take a great
deal of practice. That's probably the reason why babbling continues well after the
appearance of the first few words.

Father: Say "jump."
Child: Dup.
Father: No, "jump."
Child: Dup.
Father: No, "jummmp."
Child: Only Daddy can say dup! (CLARK (2003), 72)
This need not be elaborated further. All parents have observed how much time and
effort it takes the children to articulate the speech sounds clearly and correctly, and have
often worried about persistent difficulties their children had with individual sounds or
sound combinations. They expect their child to master all the MT sounds by the time
they go to school.
A fully developed speech organ involving the coordination of so many muscles is an
invaluable help when we tackle a new language. There is, however, some language
growth which, from a foreign language perspective, is a loss, and where in fact the
mother tongue turns out to be a hindrance for second language learners, instead of a
help. As children slowly succeed in articulating one sound sequence after another, one
would expect them, in a parallel development, to discriminate more and more sound
contrasts. In fact, the opposite is the case. As listeners, infants start out ready for any
language, but then reorganize their phonetic perception from "universal" to language-
specific. As they tune in to the sounds of their first language, they show a decline in
sensitivity to sound distinctions used in languages that are not their own. For instance,
Japanese and American seven-months-olds can discriminate /r/ from /l/ equally well.
But one-year-old Japanese infants (and adults) have practically lost the ability to
distinguish between "ra" and "la", whereas the American babies not only continued to
hear the changes from /r/ to /l/, but even got better at making this distinction (GOPNIK et
al. (2001), 107). On the other hand, one-year old English-speaking infants can no longer
discriminate the /u/ and /y/ vowels. I asked Gisa, a 3-year-old German girl, to sing along
"This old man, he played one […]" and to join us in "Sur le pont d'Avignon […]" and
we heard the accent typical of a German native speaker. She substituted German "wann"
for "one", "sur" became /zyr/ instead of /syr/, etc. As if she transformed the actual
sounds she heard into sounds closer to the mother tongue sounds. "By six to twelve
months of age, the baby is no longer a citizen of the world but a culture-bound language

specialist, like you and me." (GOPNIK et al. 2001, 123). It is at the level of sounds that
the native language most distinctly intrudes on the learner's foreign languages. This,
indeed, can make life miserable to FL learners, and most of us will never get rid of their
accents. The mental representations of speech sounds we have established during
childhood interfere with the representations required by the foreign language. So
learners have to develop new auditory habits, but the articulatory gains we have made in
and through mother tongue far outweigh these perceptual losses.
4. Foreign language teachers often complain that their pupils have "no grammar." They
find that whenever they mention categories like adjectives, passives or relative clauses,
they are like a sealed book to them. Their criticism is levelled against their colleagues
who teach the mother tongue and have obviously not taught those terms.
But adjectives etc. are only profound mysteries to the pupils in the sense that they
cannot define them adequately. Given a few mother tongue examples, they might
correctly list many more adjectives. Most important of all: when they speak, they
obviously know what to do with adjectives in a sentence and how to put them to good
use to understand and express themselves. If you can make intelligent use of your
computer, it's really all you need. Who cares if you can define it? Categories such as
adjectives live in the minds of school children, whether they can define them properly
or not.
Similarly, speakers of many native tongues can handle inflections and know that an
ending like -ing or -ed can do different jobs in a sentence. They can easily be made
aware of the fact that there are constraints on word order, and that most words have
more than one meaning, because polysemy is ubiquitous.
The processes of linguistic analysis, the nature of sound-symbol relationship, the very
nature of language itself, are the same for the foreign language. This book is thus based
on the belief that there is a connection between English and any foreign language. It is, as
a matter of fact, an attempt to establish or re-establish the connection between English
and foreign language learning, which has often been lost sight of in the development of
recent foreign language courses and curricula. (POLITZER 1965, vi )
Note, however, that the path-breaking power of L1 grammar is not dependent on the
fact that target language and the mother tongue share a grammatical feature such as the

pluperfect tense or relative clauses (most of the world's languages don't have them). It is
of course easy to see that if both languages do have the pluperfect tense or relative
clauses in common, they need not be taught from scratch, i.e. the teaching can focus on
the formal coding rather than the function. But it is because all languages have evolved
means of expressing abstract ideas such as agent, number, possession, conditions,
obligation etc., no matter how they do this, that one natural language is enough to open
the door for the grammars of other languages. For instance, modern Greek uses a that-
clause where English uses an infinitive: "You must go now" is in Greek *"you must that
you go now," or "I want to sleep" is *"I want that I sleep." The constructions don't
agree, but our mother tongue provides us with the means of understanding the foreign
mode of expression. Even if there is no "if" in a language, that language can express
conditions and thus clarify the function of "if" in those languages that have such a
conjunction.
In German and English we can express obligation and permission by using modal
verbs. Not so in Korean, which has to operate with preceding conditional clauses –
rather complicated from our point of view:
"You must read this book." Korean: "If you don't read this book, it is not OK."
"You needn't read this book." Korean: "Even if you don't read the book, it is OK."
(after GIVÓN 1989, 338)
We always find mother tongue approximations of the original which can be used for the
time being to gain access to the text and ensure an initial understanding. Searle's (1969,
19) principle of expressibility applies: "Whatever can be meant, can be said;" by
extension, whatever can be said, can be translated. In FL classrooms, meaning-
conveyance via the native tongue can be 100% successful, even though some niceties of
rhythm and register may be missing.
Children realize – or can easily be made to realize – that there is no single match of
form and function. By the time they encounter a foreign language at school, it will not
surprise them that a foreign phrase can have several valid translations. Learners have
also come to understand some of the finer points of language use: idiomatic phrases,
figurative speech, metaphors and irony. For instance, we can distinguish between core
meaning (prototypical meaning) and non-core meanings of words, and, correspondingly,

develop intuitions regarding the potential transferability of meanings between
languages.
Core meanings may function as a springboard. "Eye," "oeil," "Auge" are useful
equivalents, although there is a host of collocations and idioms where "eye" cannot be
rendered by "oeil" or "Auge". The wide spectrum of meaning of such words can only be
developed gradually. A monolingual demonstration "These are my eyes, this is my left
eye, and this is my right eye" would be just as "wrong" as the translation, i.e.
incomplete, and could lead to the same mistakes. "Unter vier Augen" is not *"under four
eyes", but "in strict confidence;" "vor aller Augen" is "openly" or "publicly," "aus den
Augen verlieren" is "lose sight of" and not *"lose out of the eyes." Only with growing
competence will learners acquire a feel for the extension and transferability of core
meanings. Good language learners tend to avoid transferring non-core meanings. Errors,
of course, are inevitable.
In fact, "a generalized capacity to process syntax" is postulated which helps the
acquisition of a native, as well as a foreign language, according to Skehan (1989, 33).
The ability to learn foreign languages easily can, therefore, be predicted by looking at
the mother tongue. Ganschow & Sparks (2001, 87) summarise the results of the studies
related to this topic, concluding that "Native language skills in the phonological/
orthographic, syntactic, and semantic codes form the basic foundation for foreign
language learning". For a century, a large part of the language teaching profession has
ignored the very foundations on which foreign language learning is built.
5. Arabic script moves from right to left, from back page to front. Chinese characters
normally follow one another without breaks to indicate individual words. By contrast,
young European learners learn early in their schooling that writing flows from left to
write, and the flow of speech can be broken into words which are spaced on the page. In
whatever language, however, the concept of linearity is there. Learners with
alphabetical mother tongues are aware of complex phoneme-grapheme relationships.
Moreover, the motor skills for writing have been established long before another school
language is introduced. Native language literacy skills are transferred to the foreign
language.

To sum up. All these knowledge sources are available at the foreign language initial
state. It has taken children years to obtain them, all of childhood. What children can do
with words by the time foreign language teaching starts, and how many way stations
there are along the road to language, all this is as yet hardly dreamt of in our teaching
philosophy. However, the many challenging engineering problems that we humans
solve as we speak and use language are more and more coming to light (CLARK 2003;
TOMASELLO 2003).
When we encounter a foreign language, our minds will make a great many
assumptions so deeply embedded in the operation of our language brain that we cannot
erase them. If we did not see the new language through the lens of those assumptions, it
would not be a blessing, but a catastrophe. Years of mother tongue input and
interactions have altered our brains and shaped our minds in ways that are
overwhelmingly helpful for the acquisition of new languages. It makes excellent
biological sense for a new language to piggy-back onto this open channel of
communication. The MT is a richly furnished base camp from which we all set out to
conquer new language territories.
The complexity of the skills a talking child brings to the classroom have been grossly
underrated by the teaching profession. Most of it seems to have come about so
effortlessly and instinctively that we are quite unaware even of the sheer amount of the
learning load. Teachers, in general, have not pondered just how much young children
know, and how infants got from knowing nothing to knowing so much. As they observe
their students lapsing into their mother tongue and happily chatting away during group
work, many must have sighed: If only they could ignore it for a while … However, the
learners would use it less where it distracts from the foreign language, if only the
teacher knew how to use it better.
Experimental Evidence
Word recognition experiments carried out by the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (GOEBEL 2003) have provided incontrovertible evidence

for the underlying presence of the MT. Competition between candidate words in the
mental lexicon is the core assumption of most models of spoken word recognition.
Candidate words are those which start with identical sound sequences. Since the number
of such possible word candidates is much smaller in a FL as yet imperfectly mastered,
one would think that word recognition would be faster – provided that the theoretical
model were correct. However, it turned out that listeners, unconsciously, of course, and
involuntarily, also activated native language words. Dutch listeners apparently could not
avoid considering native-language word candidates for recognition of a non-native
word, even though they followed instructions in English and expected English words.
Native word candidates popped up on their mental screen, as it were, however so
briefly, before being deactivated. As Anne Cutler's experiments in Nijmegen have
shown, the direct method is a misnomer. (www.mpi.nl/Members/AnneCutler) For the
beginner, there is no direct association between picture and FL word because the L1
word cannot be bypassed. This has often been pointed out by practising teachers. Show
a picture of a pear, and the learner will say to himself: "Aha, 'pear' is 'Birne'." The
picture is not more "direct" than the MT word.
Classroom Observations and Reflections
Ever since the direct method was invented towards the end of the nineteenth century,
critics have maintained that the direct principle is a delusion. Teaching monolingually
without the help of the mother tongue is of course possible; however, monolingual
learning is an intrinsic impossibility. We all take what we already know and use this as a
basis to learn more. No one can simply turn off what they already know. We postulate
that the mother tongue is "silently" present in beginners, even when lessons are kept
monolingual.
Some have argued that just because the mother tongue is so deeply entrenched in our
mental lives and inner consciousness, it's the Enemy No 1 which foreign language
teachers have to combat. The teacher faces "the difficulty of overcoming the barrier of
the pupils' mother tongue. For the mother tongue acts as a block in all the learners'

language reactions, and impedes the learning of the new language because it is so firmly
seated as the first language" (GURREY 1970, 3). A barrier and a block? Only at first
sight. The opposite, of course, is true: not only MT and FL, but all the child's varied
languages experiences must and do interact and inform each other.
Just as we build upon our ability to vocalise, read and to write, so we are unable to
switch off our knowledge of the world. We have associations, whether we want them or
not. They just happen to us. So "ignoring or forbidding English will not do, for learners
inevitably engage in French-English associations and formulations in their minds"
(HAMMERLY 1989, 51). "Translation/transfer is a natural phenomenon and an inevitable
part of second language acquisition [...], regardless of whether or not the teacher offers
or 'permits' translation" (HARBORD 1992, 351). Ever since the days of Sweet and
Palmer, the irrepressibility of associations in the MT has been regularly confirmed as a
sad, but unavoidable, fact of life by teachers observing in their own classrooms.
This attitude, however, has a false ring to it. "You can banish the MT from the
classroom, but you cannot banish it from the pupils' heads." It sounds as if we were in
fact saying: "Sorry, but we can't do anything about it, so let's accept it." The MT as an
evil, albeit a necessity. However, teachers should do everything to work with this
natural tendency rather than against it – not because it is inevitable, but because it is a
vital stage for the beginner: without it there would be blank incomprehension.
Successful learners capitalise on the vast amount of linguistic skills and world
knowledge they have accumulated via the MT – whether the teacher openly supports
these processes or not. Felt needs bring forth their own solutions. For the beginner,
becoming aware of meanings automatically involves connecting them with the MT –
until the FL has established an ever-more complex network for itself.
I have borrowed the phrase Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) from
Bruner (1983) who uses it along with environmental "scaffolding" in the context of L1
acquisition. In foreign language learning, the LASS is mainly provided by the mother
tongue, with learners engaging in their own self-scaffolding. Our job is to assist them in
this task and, among other things, use the MT as a rapid conduit to meaning instead of
ignoring or even trying to suppress what goes on in the pupils' minds.

Brooks (1964, 142) assumes we could guide the learner along the right linguistic
path "by rendering English inactive while the new language is being learned." Any
classroom approach based on such a philosophy would be at once impossible,
impractical and fundamentally flawed. There is no choice: We all see the new in terms
of the familiar. If we didn't, we wouldn't understand.
The Way Ahead
Leading German textbooks have bilingual grammar and vocabulary sections. Here,
common sense has prevailed, but only part of the problem has been solved since the
practice remains without a solid theoretical underpinning. Moreover, many countries
still favour purely monolingual textbooks. It is in these countries, where purely English-
language textbooks are widespread, that pupils truly suffer.
We must discard the way issues about the mother tongue have been framed for more
than a century, namely that it is only a matter of meaning-conveyance, and that
meaning-conveyance is only a matter of unknown words. Against such a reduced view, I
want to advance a rich understanding of the role of the mother tongue because its
targeted and calculated use has repercussions on many other aspects of teaching, such as
communication, content and quality of texts used, and grammar. The prevailing
orthodoxy has to be overturned and foreign language teaching put solidly back on its
feet. Foreign languages piggyback on L1. Teen-age learners have accumulated an
immense charge and reservoir of semantic and grammatical meanings which must be
released and transferred to the target language. If they didn't intuitively mediate their
learning of L2 through their mother tongue, foreign language teaching would be a
hopeless undertaking. Mother tongue support is thus an absolute necessity for the
foreign language learner, and well-devised, provably effective bilingual techniques
should be central techniques that all teachers should learn to master. They will benefit
all learners, but will especially help low-performing students, those with disabilities or
risk factors. Framing the issue in such a way that foreign language is best when it is
mother-tongue-free (whatever that means) is a colossal mistake.

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