Stamping French words or memorizing mathematical formulas: for many high school students it sometimes feels like useless. Because how much of that knowledge is actually left over later, in your working life? Didn’t you end up doing all that stamping for nothing?
It is very difficult to examine how much is left of your high school knowledge.
A teacher will say that it is not so much about the knowledge itself as it is about learning to learn. But what is actually known about preserving that knowledge that we acquire at an early age? That turns out to be a very difficult question to answer, because very little scientific research has been done on it. To research what people remember from all that high school knowledge, you will have to follow them for a long time, which often is not time or money. If you compare different generations, their basic knowledge is often not comparable: because what you learn now in a profession like French is very different from 50 years ago. And then there are also large individual differences between students in the way in which they learn a subject such as French and what final level they achieve. You need a lot of test subjects to filter out those differences.
No loss of language over a longer period of time
Nevertheless, studies are conducted every now and then into the preservation and loss of that knowledge. For example, two studies in the 1980s showed remarkable results: 587 American subjects who had learned Spanish in high school had retained 70 percent of their vocabulary after 25 years, and 150 Dutch subjects who had learned French in school had a large part of their vocabulary at the ready for years to come. Their pronunciation was even slightly improved.
A recent study is a pilot study by Monika Schmid, professor of linguistics in York, which she conducted at the University of Essex during corona times. To do this, she and colleagues designed an online questionnaire that was completed by 491 Britons, who had learned French in school. They were asked all kinds of questions, such as how long they had had French and at what level, whether they also used French after high school, and how much they think they still know. Their (passive) knowledge of both grammar and vocabulary was then tested by means of a multiple-choice test.
Connections in the multilingual brain
The results were partly as expected: participants who had previously had more French and at a higher level now scored better on the language proficiency test. However, there were also some remarkable results. For example, it didn’t seem to matter much whether people had used French after high school. Increased use had only a very small effect on their vocabulary. What was even more amazing: no language loss was measured among the participants at all. In fact, people who had taken French longer ago showed a slightly better score on vocabulary. “That could also be a coincidence”, says Schmid. “But your overall vocabulary gets better with age anyway. And maybe there is transfer.”
The languages we have learned are all connected in our brain.
By this, Schmid is referring to the way in which languages we have learned are all connected in our brain. When we are looking for a word, a whole network of words lights up in our brain, all of which have a meaning relationship with each other. For example, when we think of the word ‘door’, words related to it are also activated, such as ‘house’ and ‘window’. We know this from reaction time research. When people see or hear a word from the same network after the word ‘door’, such as ‘window’, they recognize it faster than when they are presented with a completely different word such as ‘green pea’.
But when we have learned English, the English ‘door’ also has a connection with ‘deur’, so this word also lights up briefly when we use the Dutch ‘deur’. So the use of our mother tongue alone stimulates the foreign language knowledge we have, says Schmid. This applies to both vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. And that ensures that foreign language knowledge is preserved so well. Because we use language all day long.
True and False Friends
With Kristin Lemhöfer I continue to talk about the unique way in which language is stored in our brain. She has been researching the psychological (and neurological) side of learning a foreign language for twenty years at the Donders Institute. This falls under the discipline of psycholinguistics (‘linguistics’ is another word for linguistics). Indeed, the languages we master are all interconnected, says Lemhöfer. But the researcher doubts that these connections also have a positive effect on language retention. You have both good and bad connections, she explains.
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“The Dutch ‘deur’ and the English ‘door’ are ‘good’ connections, we call them cognates. Because those words are similar, they stimulate each other. In that case, your knowledge of Dutch helps when you search for the English word. But the opposite also exists. In so-called ‘false friends’, words look similar, but mean very different things. Then those words get in each other’s way, which causes word-finding problems. If you learn a second language that is very different from your first language, your first language is the most affected.”
Lemhöfer takes herself as an example: her mother tongue is German and that helps her when she speaks Dutch as she does now, but sometimes that language also gets in the way. You can hear that from her pronunciation, for example. “I have trouble with my German when I try to speak Dutch well. While learning my native language, certain settings were turned on in my brain that are difficult to reverse. Some Englishmen who have lived in the Netherlands for a long time still use the English order in subordinate clauses such as ‘because I have seen that’. Those connections in our brain are indeed there, otherwise we wouldn’t be bothered by them.”
According to Lemhöfer, existing psycholinguistic models would rather predict the opposite: that words from different languages have an inhibitory effect on each other. She holds up her teacup: “Now if I want to say the word ‘cup’, I have to push aside the German ‘Tasse’ which is also activated. Every time I use the Dutch ‘kop’, I push that German word away. So the more I use ‘kop’, the harder it is for me to remember and say ‘Tasse’.” The German word is therefore activated for a while, as Schmid states, but at the same time it is pushed further away in consciousness, according to Lemhöfer, so that we can reach it even less well. “After all, you also see that with many emigrants: that they lose a large part of their mother tongue.”
If you learned to play the violin earlier, you pick it up faster later in life. The same goes for learning a language. Research among adopted children in the Netherlands also shows that they learn the language from their country of origin more easily at a later age, even if they were adopted as babies. Read more
Unconscious language input
The psycholinguist also has difficulty with the self-reported use of French in the British study. “People themselves may say that they don’t use French much, but unconsciously you are still exposed to such a language a lot. You do get a lot through the media and there are, for example, quite a lot of French loanwords in both Dutch and English. So I don’t know to what extent people can realistically estimate that. In fact, you should look at people who have learned a language that really does not play a role in their environment.”
A study that Lemhöfer recently conducted with colleagues shows that frequency of use does play a major role in maintaining language skills. “We looked at 97 German test subjects who had lived in Spain for six months. After they had lived in Germany for another six months, we looked at how much they had forgotten. Frequency of use turned out to be the determining factor: how often they had used Spanish afterwards determined how much they still knew.”
Both researchers agree that you learn a little faster if you’ve learned it before. “If you played the violin thirty years ago, you pick it up faster than someone who has never played it before,” says Lemhöfer. “The same goes for language.”
And that is exactly what Schmid now wants to investigate further. “I find it very remarkable that there are so many apps and courses for learning foreign languages, but no one has ever thought that language learning works differently for someone who wants to retrieve knowledge that is still hidden somewhere in the memory. . You really don’t have to start all over again. You just need to tickle the language a little. But how do you do that? That is the big question.”
What do you remember about high school French?
Sources
- Bahrick, Harry P. Fifty Years of Second Language Attrition: Implications for Programmatic Research. The Modern Language Journal. Vol. 68, No. 2 (Summer, 1984), pp. 105-118.
- Mickan, A., McQueen, J. M., Brehm, L., & Lemhöfer, K. (2022). Individual differences in foreign language attrition: a 6-month longitudinal investigation after a study abroad. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-29. DOI:10.1080/23273798.2022.2074479
- Schmid, Monika S. (2022). The final frontier? Why we have been ignoring second language attrition, and why it is time we stopped. Language Teaching 1-21. DOI: 10.1017/S0261444822000301
- Schmid, Monika S. (2022). Modern language GCSEs continue to fall in popularity – but new research shows language knowledge will last you a lifetime. The Conversation.
- Weltens, B. (1989). The attrition of French as a foreign language. Dordrecht. DOI:10.1515/9783111395937