Interaction to Acquire

The Role of Interaction to Acquire a Second Language
By Julio Foppoli

In our previous article we described a typical scenario that most adult second language learners face today. They want to master a language and they want to do it fast. After some brief research on the Internet, they decide to invest a huge amount of money on the latest “failure-proof” Spanish course supposedly created by experts that made so many people speak overnight! (One wonders where these speakers are!) After working hard watching videos and doing grammar and vocabulary exercises time and again, they come to the conclusion that, although they may have learned lots of vocabulary and phrases, if they had to engage in a real conversation with a real native speaker of the language, they would be in deep trouble.

I am sure that many of you will feel identified with this situation and unfortunately, this is a common scenario nowadays. Adult learners are usually lured by the mere thought of learning Spanish (or any other language!) without any kind of physical boundaries or time constraints. The idea of learning a language at any time and in the comfort of their living rooms, bedrooms or even their bathrooms sounds appealing to them. Time or place are not that important, they say. Why working with a teacher if you have everything you need inside one little CD or DVD? There so many videos there, native speaker voices, vocabulary drills, audio exercises, pronunciation practice and so on and so forth that the idea of having an instructor to actually “teach” you anything seems to be a thing of the past.

However, no matter how much time, money, and effort you could put into making this program work for them, soon enough you will be confronted with the harsh fact:

Fact #1

You cannot learn a language without interaction.