Language Acquisition: Then and Now. Part 3

written December, 2022.

The Education Industry has seen these emerging trends in the late 20th century and early 21st century and has worked to put out many courses of various levels to try to reach new audiences. In the 1990s and 2000s, many mixed media packages, that is a paper book or pamphlet and audio CD package was a common experience in bookstores and online marketplaces. With that being said, the quality of the material was notably different compared to the past. Printed material in the middle of the 20th century to the 1980s was oriented towards serious students and thus had grammatical exercises, large vocabulary lists and self contained work. The newer courses that followed however was for a more casual audience. Research and work done by individuals such as Stephen Krashen and Professor Alexander Arguelles has documented the lack of content in newer courses. It is unfortunate since the price hasn’t been lowered to reflect this lack of content, but has kept pace with inflation. The trend of removing content to focus on casual conversation has continued into the 2010s and early 2020s as now it is almost a requirement to purchase multiple courses to reach the same threshold as those of an earlier time. Despite the failure of these modern courses of the same brand to provide the experience of before, there is now more substantial website media and application language learning.

In the age of social media, new applications have come about to meet the increased demand of second language acquisition. Applications such as Babel, Duolingo, Lingq and others have provided a platform, usually “fremium”, that is some basic material is free to learn with, whereas the majority of the content must be paid for. Despite being marketed for a casual market, these site have had success, especially with the increase of demand for learning the English language by people overseas. Generally, what these applications have in common is that they try to “gamify” the routine of memorizing and exposure to the target language.5050 One of the way they accomplish this is with using icons and email notifications to remind their audience to come back and keep their day streak going on. In addition, these websites will usually provide more incentives for customers to seek out other products to explore and presumably pay money for. The benefit of this type of media, is that it allows you to explore different offerings while not committing much time or money towards a given task. This is much different than going to University or other private school offerings where large expenses are due up front. The negative aspect of this learning methodology is while it has been examined that some progress can be made on these different platforms, it is not enough for those individuals who are looking to get credentials in a language on the European framework or other like frameworks and it will not replace having a teaching in a classroom to guide those students on common mistakes and how to avoid them.51

Another development has emerged in the American market for second language acquisition. The rise of Spanish language publication. Traditionally, through the 20th century, much of the publication of books and other printed media occurred in Spain and to a lesser extent Mexico.52 This restriction of location for publishing in Spanish has made it that a lot of material is not widely available in the United States in the past; however, since the 2000s, there has been notice in the corporate publishing industry that there is a fast growing demographic of Spanish speaking people in the United States. The amount of Spanish speakers has accelerated since the 1980s; therefore, big publishers in the United States are currently heavily invested in producing bilingual education material and publishing new Spanish language publications of known, popular books.53 It is now common to see a major author in the US have a simulation or near simultaneous release of their novel or nonfiction book in bookstores to reach this demographic. The methods and execution of business to reach this market has led to technological developments in the classroom. Now it is common to see middle school and high school students using published software, that is interactive software to connect their language to English vocabulary.5454 This software approach has had mixed results in performance of students in US State administered testing, but it will likely evolve to improve on what results have been accomplished according to standard metrics of assessment.

In conclusion, the study of language acquisition and its implementation will continue to be progressed forward by a mixture of government, military and private industry for different outcomes. Challenges exist that need to be addressed for the overall education system in the United States including the problems of using standardized tests to measure results and the decline of reading ability among the American public; yet, with concerted effort in the means and techniques to tackle these problems, these problems can be solved with the passage of time.

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