Teaching a Language

I distinctly remember when I was in first grade, my teacher told us never to say "runned". I then understandably found myself puzzled a few weeks later, when I was reading an installment from Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones series. In this series, Junie B. Jones speaks like a typical young elementary school student, using phrases like "seed", "goed", and (yes) "runned". Later in life, I was taking a Spanish class, and we were learning the conjugations of the verb "to know". Our teacher emphasized that to say "I know" in the present tense, we had to say "yo se", not "yo sabo", even though the normal system of verb conjugations implies the latter. She mentioned that this was one of the most common mistake that children who are native speakers of the language make.

These two anecdotes, combined with Eve Clark's paper on language acquisition in children, calls into question methods used in schools of teaching foreign languages. In natural language acquisition, children generally learn a set of rules first, and then gradually, over many years, figure out and internalize the exceptions to those rules. Rather than developing a clear picture of a small part of the language before moving on to other parts of the language, children have a blurry picture of how the language works a an entirety. The blurriness represents the overarching grammatical and semantic rules of the language, and as they learn the exceptions to these rules, the fuzzy edges in their picture become more clearly defined, until they understand how to properly put together sentences of their choosing. The question is whether it would be feasible to teach a foreign language class in this way-- to first introduce a few elementary, very general rules, and have students try to form sentences and have conversations with just these limited rules. Although students might internalize incorrect grammatical rules at first, this method may provide better intuition for the language, allowing students to "think" in this new language (as a child acquiring the language as his/her first would), rather than having to remember so many grammatical rules at a time that they are essentially translating from their native language to this foreign one. Perhaps this would not be feasible in the traditional classroom setting as we know it, but even applying some of these findings about how children learn languages to the foreign language classroom might help with intuition and retention later on in life.