Anyone who wants to speak Arabic, Mandarin or French fluently should not start by focusing on vocabulary or grammar, according to researchers at the UCL Institute of Education in London and Tohoku University in Japan.
In a new study, they attempted to map the brains of 67 Japanese people as they pronounced English words containing sounds that do not exist in their native language.
The researchers found that people who are linguistically gifted perceive unfamiliar speech as acoustic signals rather than words, allowing them to ignore or circumvent deeply ingrained patterns from their native language.
“Learners with high auditory precision can benefit greatly from relatively limited input, while others may need significantly more exposure before unfamiliar sounds begin to solidify,” said Kazuya Saito-van Poeteren, lead author of the study and professor of second language acquisition at the UCL Institute of Education, according to The Guardian.
Previous research has focused primarily on external factors such as age of acquisition and amount of exposure, but the new study finds that these factors do not explain why some people sound almost fluent in a second language while others retain a strong accent.
Foreign language teaching should move away from an approach based on "more practice" and instead focus on developing students’ ears for language learning, based on their individual hearing characteristics, says Kazuya Saito-van Poeteren.