Learning a foreign speech in the local context

Learning a foreign language (L2) 

as decoding information (e.g., translation) may be difficult in a local context, such as in schools and communities where no one around speaks the language, but not too difficult to address because we can optimize our first language (L1) to the utmost limit. However, learning L2 speech in the local context in addition to one’s L1 speech is probably the most complicated and collisional challenge if it is compared to the other academic achievements in schools pursuing globalism, such as prulilingualism.

This conflict, which learners, teachers, and theorists as well, often confront, has its origin in a unique feature we experience when we learn or teach any L2. In fact, every teaching plan, in the classroom practice, entails language-in-interaction to maneuver. It is thus doubled in this sense for us to learn L2 speech by speech; that is, because we are orally situated in our community, we need to use a spoken language, and it is so even right at the moment of learning it as the target. Thus, we come to the long disputed question among theorists, how much we should optimize our speech. If we increase L1 to optimize our understanding, it hinders our L2 speech. On the contrary, if we get rid of L1 to optimize our L2, we lose a degree of understanding.

So the bottom line seems to be so far in our persistent, will-or-choice processes of L1 due to this unique difficulty of speech learning. In the countries of monolingual society, such as Japan or Korea, one can hardly acquire the additional linguistic system in a similar way that he or she has spontaneously (or we should say, “subconsciously”) acquired the L1. This being the case, the conflict is obviously attributable to the fact that we have already acquired L1 before the learning starts, and that we cannot even go through this particular process without accelerating and decelerating our L1 process.

It is, therefore, not a question derived from information processing of a sole learner, but an environmental matter of a teacher’s and learners’ mutual engagement that, through the entire class work, how both become habituated to the additional unfamiliar system towards the social commitment for new behaviors or communities. Further, it cost eventually many consistent efforts to attain this achievement and this is why learning L2 in the local context is far more difficult and challenging than learning decoding. ao