Shownotes
In this episode Dr Zavaleta talks to Dr Bisson about incidental learning and how we can use this type of learning to help us learn a language in and out of the classroom. Being exposed to a language can help you pick up new words, syntax and grammar even if you are engaged in another task. This can be something like playing a game with foreign language words, reading a book in the foreign language, watching a foreign language film with subtitles or immersing yourself in the foreign language environment. This type of learning is very similar to how we learn our native language and requires no conscious effort to learn.
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Or get in touch via email: kaitlyn.zavaleta@dmu.ac.uk and marie-josee.bisson@dmu.ac.uk
Or contact them via the De Montfort University website: Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta and Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
The Language Scientists Podcast website: languagescientists.our.dmu.ac.uk
Link to Dr Bisson's research lab: sites.google.com/view/languagelab-dmu
Example article about Dr Bisson's research:
Transcripts
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you're a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who's interested in languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I'm Doctor Marie-Josee Bisson
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And I'm Dr. Marie -Josee Bisson.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
We are the language scientists and this is our podcast. Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. So we're both lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we both do language learning research.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
We do. But this is something that we're really just interested in as we are language learners ourselves.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
That's right. I mean, I'm a native speaker, French, but I acquired English gradually over the years to hopefully become bilingual. But I also enjoyed learning German and Spanish.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And I'm a native English speaker who studied French over several years and kind of still uses it and studied Spanish in other languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So. So we're language geeks.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So, you are a native French speaker. Can you tell us a little bit about your language background?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes, so. Well, I'm from a very monolingual French speaking family. I come from Canada originally, but the French speaking part of Canada, so the province of Quebec. And so everything in my life happened in French up to a certain age, but also because of where we are in Quebec, we are surrounded by English speakers and we get all the English TV channels, English music. So I gradually learned lots of English words. My dad, also, when we were growing up annoyingly, always wanted to watch films in the original soundtrack so that he played them in English and we hated it as children. But actually it did us the world of good. So we learned lots of English that way, but also in primary and secondary schools in Quebec, we learned English as a second language. So I had a little bit of kind of intentional learning there in the classroom as well. And so gradually I became bilingual. I also when I got to college, I got to choose whether I wanted to go to an English or French speaking college, and I chose an English speaking college. So then again, you know, there was an explosion of English learning there. All my classes were in English. I lived with English speakers. So that's my history of learning English. But also I picked up German and Spanish throughout my development, I suppose. German I went in to to do a student exchange with Germany. So I went to live with the family for three months in Germany. So I learned a lot of German that way. And in college, I studied German and Spanish as my degree.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So then how did you get into language learning research?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, that came a lot later. So after I did my college degree, I eventually not not at first, but eventually decided to do an undergraduate degree in psychology. So, you know, learning more about generally all the different psychological theories and stuff like that. And then after that, I decided to move to the U.K. I met my husband and then he was British. So we decided to move to the UK. And when we arrived here, I needed to find a job, of course, and I didn't know what to do, but I thought, Oh, I'm a native speaker, so maybe I could teach people French. And I looked it up and they had a great program at the time, the graduate teacher training program. So you literally worked in a school straightaway, kind of like an assistant teacher, and then gradually you started picking up classes and you started teaching and then you attended university once a week. So then I became a French teacher and I worked and I did that for about five years. So teaching French to primary school children in secondary school at A-level. And after that, I wanted to do a little bit more. I enjoyed it, but I wanted to do a bit more. And I thought, Well, why not put psychology with the language learning? So they came together nicely. And so I decided to go back and do a Ph.D. and the overall theme of my Ph.D. was to facilitate language learning.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So facilitating language learning, what does that mean?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So I wanted well, I just wanted to make it easier for people to learn languages, basically, and the main thing that I was interested in was incidental learning. And. Well, this is the topic of today, isn't it?
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Tada, you got there. So today you're you're telling us a bit more about incidental language learning. So what is incidental language learning then?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So incidental learning is, well, if I construct it with explicit learning, that might help people understand. So explicit learning would be more like the language learning classroom situation, where the aim is very much to focus on the learning aspect, learning the words, learning the grammar rules, maybe route memorisation. You know, you have a list of vocabulary with the word in French the word in English, And you try to remember the two together. So you really much to focus on the learning.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So this is the conjugation tables in Latin memorising all of those.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely. So, a lot of memorising. So that's explicit learning. Well sometimes people call it intentional learning as well, so they mean the same thing. But on the other hand, incidental learning is much more informal so there the aim is not on learning. So you might be playing a game, you might be doing a word search, she might be watching a film in a foreign language, you might be listening to a song, but because you are exposed to language, you can start picking up some new words or some new grammar or some syntax or.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So does it still count as incidental language learning? If you are saying, Well, I'm going to watch my favourite show in French to learn the language?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes, I think so, because, I mean, even if you made that decision because you thought that might help you with learning the language as you're watching the film, you're not going to necessarily focus on memorising the words. You're going to be focusing on enjoying the series or the show. And you know what's happening in the image, what's happening with the relationship, the characters, you know, you get very much engrossed into the actual film. But again, because you're just being exposed to that language, you can soak up some new words.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And then as we saw, obviously we think about like taking a class in another language that's that intentional language learning exposure. But in our everyday lives, do we have any other experience with learning other languages through just kind of being exposed to it?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, there's lots of opportunities outside of the classroom, I think, like we said, which with the films and the series, I mean, that's that's an obvious one, isn't it? Because that's really enjoyable and easy to do nowadays. So Netflix, you can change the language quite easily or you can have the subtitles on or off. You can even play with the language of the subtitles as well. So I would say, you know, if you're a complete beginner in the language, you probably want to have your native language in the subtitles so you can understand what's happening. But as you become more fluent, you could switch to the same language as the soundtrack so that you can then extract some of the words more easily. When they're being spoken you can follow with the soundtrack, the soundtrack with the subtitles too much to map it together, basically.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right, almost like a sing along.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Well, there we go. You could why not do karaoke in another language? That's an excellent example. And because you're following along with the words on screen and you're saying, you know, you will definitely start picking things up. You might want to watch song clip videos. So YouTube's a good place for that. So you might watch a video clip of a song in French and then you can have the subtitles on the French subtitles, for example, so you can follow what's being said. Songs are really good as well because they're quite repetitive. The words come back and it's quite catchy, so it might really stick in your head. So that's another good example
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Hopefully, the right words.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, absolutely. If you have the chance to travel, obviously that's a really good one for, you know, immersing yourself in not just the language but the culture as well its really, really good. You'll be bombarded then with words everywhere you look, you know, just road signs. And, you know, if you walking around a museum, you might see some of the words that are in the description. So there's lots of opportunities for incidental learning outside of the classroom, but also inside the classroom. I think teachers should be willing to experiment with different activities, you know, sometimes just giving the students a game in in that language so that they're not focusing on learning words per say. They're just enjoying playing the game. But again, because they're using the words, they'll just increase their knowledge.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So it sounds to me that with incidental language learning, it's kind of advantageous to folks who are trying to learn a new language, but maybe they're not the best at just memorisation. They don't have to just rely on that.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, I think that's a good point because, you know, sometimes I meet people and they ask me what I do for work. Oh I'm a language learning researcher and they say language learning is so hard I can't learn it. And I'm like, that's so not true. Everybody can learn a language because we all learned our native languages, right? So, and the way we learn our native language is mostly through incident learning. So it's very informal. You know, nobody gives you lists of vocabulary. Well, not at first anyways, because you can't read and write. So you just you listen to your parents speak, you try to extract words to try to extract information for from this kind of continuous speech stream that's happening around you. And eventually our brains are very good at picking out regularities, things that are repeating, patterns. So you will start extracting things as a child. You do this, but as adults as well. You will if you're exposed to enough language, you know. So children start to speak when they're about two. So, you know, that's four years of exposure, parents constantly talk to their children and sometimes in simplified language as well, which is helpful too, for the learner too. So we all go through this massive episode of incidental learning as children, because this is how we learn our native language so everybody can do incidental learning. The bit that some people find difficult is the explicit learning, I would say. So, you know, not everybody enjoys trying to memorise lists of vocabulary.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
What?! No?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Because well, it's not that enjoyable, is it. Unless you can, you want to learn the word because then you know, you're going to go to the restaurant or to the grocery store and you need to be able to communicate then and then you'll be really motivated to do it. But so if you know, if, if a language learning class is not really your thing, but you know, if you've, you've done French for five years at school and you took your GCSEs and you still think that, oh, no, I'm not really good at French. Ah, but you have a base already. So, then, what you want to do is just get exposed to the language and you'll just pick things up.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. No, you're right, though. Even if you have that gap in having spoken the language, then when you drop back into that environment, suddenly you're like, wait, I do have it. It's there. I can, you know, soak up more.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, even though you think you might have forgotten something completely, you know. You haven't. It's still there somewhere, and you just need to reactivate it. So, yeah, again, putting yourself into that environment or increasing your exposure to that language a little bit will just you'll just kind of reactivate those words and you'll, it'll be faster when wants to relearn it compared to learning it for the first time anyway. So it's not lost, not all is lost. Keep with it.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So how do you research this? I mean, you can't just give people list and say, okay, so we're going to study language learning, but don't learn these words because we're going to be sneaky about it.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, no, I know. So I normally don't tell people straight away. I told them at the end of the study what the study was really about, but at the beginning I am a bit vague about it. So I tell them normally that it's about language processing. Just want to know how people process language. It's not wrong. No, no, I said I'm not lying. It's you know, that's kind of true. And then I'll ask them to do a task where. Well, again, I'm not being I'm not asking them to learn anything. But the task I use is really simple. It's a letter search task. So I show them a letter. Then the computer screen changes and they see a word. And all they have to do is tell me whether the letter they saw was, in a word, yes or no. So it's really, really simple. But at the same time as the written word is being presented, they also see a picture and they hear the foreign language word, although that's kind of additional information that they don't need for the task that they're doing. But because they're being exposed to the picture, they can start learning what the meaning of the words is and so through repeated exposure, through the the whole study, then eventually people pick up these some of these words. It's it's kind of the best task I could use for the lab situation. You know, best case scenario, it'd be great to investigate this in the wild.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
The Trueman Show.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I know. Basically, it would be good. But I mean, I need it to be super controlled so that I can really at the end of the study, I can conclude that the reason why they know these words is because I've exposed them to these words during this incident learning situation. But I like the idea of the multi modality. So the fact that there is information coming in visually with the with the written word, the picture and also some audio information, because I think you need that to reflect a little bit about what happens in real life. You know, you'll hear something, you might see a written word. There might be an object or something on the table that, you know, people are talking about. So, you know, that's kind of how the mapping happens in the wild. So I was trying to reflect that in the lab as much as I could.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Right, with constraining all the other factors.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So what is your personal favourite method of exposure or incidental learning?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
For me personally...
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
What would you do today?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I know I'd travel to Spain to refresh my Spanish and i'd do a side trip to Germany to refresh some of that German that I have somewhere in my brain, but it's a bit rusty. And of course, you know, that's a bit tricky. But I mean, nowadays there's just so much media available. So, you know, like you said, you could watch one of your series that you enjoy but switch the language of the subject to another language. I think with my children, we do this with cartoons a lot. So yeah, we watch, you know, sometimes ask me to ask me to watch TV and I'm like, okay, well, let's watch it in French. So so we did we changed the soundtrack to French and we just watch it in that language. So with cartoons you don't get the problem with lip synchronicity so much, so you can easily change the soundtrack. So maybe pick up a cartoon thats in another language.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. Your favourite movie. Your favourite animated movie.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Absolutely.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So then are there three things that you would like to maybe tell us about that. You would like us to walk away from this podcast episode with.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
u might be able to learn two,:Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for chatting through incidental language learning,
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
because I think so many people think of language learning as something that you have to sit down and memorise and do the conjugation tables. I know I do.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And do to a certain extent. And I think that really helps is a really good starter in that language. But it's not enough. It's not enough. It's not everything. But it's also all the other opportunities. I mean, like I said, most of my learning of English was not in the classroom, it was really outside of the classroom. So if you want to become fluent in another language, you really need the incidental exposure.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Thanks for joining us today, Marie. It's been a pleasure to hear more about your research and incidental language learning. In our next podcast we will be talking specifically eye tracking in language research with Professor Kathy Conklin. Now as we're finishing this episode, I just want to remind you to take 5 minutes to go into our show notes and click on the link for our survey. The survey is going to tell us what you liked about this series and what you would like to hear about next. So thank you for listening and thank you to the British Academy for funding our podcast. I'm Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And I'm Dr.Marie-Josee Bisson and you've been listening to the Language Scientists podcast.
