Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

What do you think about the saying, "Foreign languages cannot be taught, they must be learned."

"It's like the old, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."

You can teach and teach until you're blue in the face, but it's up to the students to study and learn the material.

[Little Algebra]

[Roger]

I see it slightly differently.
Your differentiation between 'acquiring' one's first tongue, and 'studying' a second language may pertain to some extent.
However, you can 'acquire' two languages simultaneously. This is more common than most would assume. Look at many European, Asian and African communities. Look at "natives' in anglophone countries - I am not too familiar with American aboriginals, but I suppose lots of them grow up perfectly bilingual.
Also, all native speakers do study their own language once their schooling has reached a higher level. That's when they study ('learn') how to meet literary criteria in communicating with other native speakers. It's when they study grammar to better understand their own language.

But 'teaching a foreign language' presents some tricky issues.
FIrst, if the language is 'foreign' to you how familiar can you be with it? Once you are a perfect speaker of that language, is it still 'foreign' to you?
Or just to your students?
The process of 'studying' a foreign tongue is a more conscious effort. You already have notions and concepts formed through your fist tongue; your problem is how to acquire the same concepts and notions in a new medium; the challenge lies in how to speazrate one thinking mode from the other. This normally requires a lot of conscious learning in a relatively short time.
Just look at how long it took you getting used to the concept of time through your first language. The baby does not realise that days can be subdivided into day and night (he or she sleeps any time!); later, he cannot of his own realise the importance of hours, minutes and seconds; he learns about these units through training and timetables set by adults.
These notions are then transferred to the new language when a second tongue is being studied. But we know that you can not alwsays transfer one notion from L 1 to L 2.
The olderstudent has to learn in a short time what he has learnt in his first tongue over his entire life up to the point when he starts studying a second language.