Apples and Oranges Are Both Fruit, But They Don't Taste the Same: A Response to Wynne Wong and Bill VanPatten

We understand the desire of Professors Wong and VanPatten ("The Evidence is IN: Drills are OUT," FLA, 2003, 36 [3], 403-23) to share with teachers of the less commonly taught languages the ideas and philosophies they have developed for the more commonly taught ones. With all due respect, we must point out that the application of their experiences was, quite simply, fraught with errors bound to occur when specialists in one foreign language attempt to generalize their experiences to other languages in which they do not have adequate background for making appropriate and accurate comparisons.2 There has been considerable empirical research on long-term successful acquisition of Russian, especially in intensive and study-abroad programs. Despite this abundance of information, Wong and VanPatten referred to only one study-one whose general applicability is highly questionable because it had such a small number of subjects (22 Russian students). Furthermore, they extrapolated from that study conclusions that were not examined in the study and used them in a way that even the study's authors stated would be inappropriate and likely inaccurate. In this essay, we will discuss Wong and VanPatten's claims about learning Russian (i.e., it is just like learning any other language, except that it takes longer) and the questionable place of drill in the study of Russian. There is a large body of evidence that refutes both these claims. We will then turn to the broader question of the place of drill in foreign language study more generally. Setting the Record Straight About Russian Wong and VanPatten argued: One of the objections we sometimes hear from colleagues in language teaching is that Russian is "more difficult" or that Japanese is not Indo-European and thus learning these languages requires special or different instructional approaches than learning Spanish or French or even English as a second language. It is true that Russian involves a different alphabet and has little Latinate basis on which to rely for teaching and learning in a classroom. It has a complex morphological system for verbs and nouns when compared to English, Spanish and French. Japanese, too, has a different writing system, no cognates with English, a complicated system of honorifics, and so on. Similar arguments can be made for Amerindian languages like Quechua and Inuit. Nonetheless, learners do acquire these languages without instruction, as is evidenced by the diaries and record of Marco Polo and missionaries who came to the new world and by the multilingualism that must have existed ever since the first time two different cultures came into contact . . . Imagine if a scientist suggested that the laws of physics developed on Earth are not applicable to the Moon, Mars, or another galaxy.? . . . Our point here is not that instruction cannot help the learning of Russian, Japanese, or any other language. It is that the role of drills cannot change depending on language. Drills are no more necessary for Russian than they are for Spanish or English. What is plausible, of course, is that learners might need extra help in getting linguistic data from the input. This is precisely the aim of PI as described and discussed in the previous section as well as all the other work on focus on form (Doughty & Williams, 1998). In one study, Kempe and MacWhinney (1998) showed that learners of Russian could acquire case marking without explicit instruction or drills. This was not the point of their study, but we cite it here as an example of research on one of the "more difficult" languages, to illustrate that drills are not necessary: Learners can learn Russian from input just like anyone else. They just may need to have it more structured and may need more time. There are many points here with which we take issue. Wong and VanPatten made several serious errors in arguing their case, including (1) mistakes about the level of difficulty of Russian, (2) misunderstanding where the difficulties lie in learning and teaching Russian, (3) the erroneous concept that "laws" of linguistics (or even physics) are fully known, immutable, and universally applicable, and (4) asserting that the universality of laws of physics provides a good analogy for laws of language learning. …

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