How Native Speakers Learn Differently Than Language Students

When I applied for a teaching position this month, I realized how much my language teaching philosophy has changed as a result of raising my own kids bilingually.  You may be surprised to learn that native speakers learn differently than language students.

Here are some differences I’ve noticed of how native speakers learn a language and how many language teachers teach:

When we learn our native languages, we never conjugate verbs

We definitely don’t sit around the dinner table talking about verb tenses!  So why do we spend so much time doing this in class?

As parents, we don’t tell our kids that we can’t talk to them about what we did yesterday because they haven’t learned the past tense yet.

We incorporate complex vocabulary, grammar, and verb tenses in our daily language because that is how people speak naturally.

Parents correct their kids when they make mistakes in the language.

We don’t say, “I don’t want to hurt my son’s feelings because he’s saying it wrong.”  We just gently correct the child by saying it correctly and having them repeat it correctly.

Often, parents speak to the child all in one language.

Some parents do a one-parent, one language approach.  One parent speaks one language and the other parent speaks a different language.  Why is this?  Because it’s really hard for your brain to switch between languages until you have reached a certain level of fluency.

It’s very difficult to replicate the repetition that you get as a native speaker with your parents speaking to you 24 hours a day when as teachers, we often only have between 1 and 5 hours a week with our students.

There just isn’t enough time! 

Hope you found this article about how native speakers learn differently helpful.  Read more about how to teach languages more effectively using my hybrid system (how native speakers learn, squeezed into 1-5 hours a week for maximum impact) in How to Teach Tricky Verbs and Grammar, Part 1.