Four Stages of Developing Language Skills
Willy A Renandya – 6 April 2022
Martin M. Broadwell, a management trainer, theorized that people typically go through 4 stages when learning a new skill. The infographics below captures these stages.
Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence, which simply means that you don’t know that you don’t know. This stage characterizes a complete novice, i.e., somebody who is thinking about learning a new skill.
Stage 2: Conscious incompetence. You know that you don’t know and are interested in learning the new skill. You understand what it takes to acquire the skill and the associated subskills, how much time investment is needed to acquire the skill, etc.
Stage 3 Conscious competence: You know that you know the skill but also know that you haven’t reached a mastery level yet. You can explain what you have learned, but can’t perform a task smoothly yet.
Stage 4 Unconscious competence: You have mastered the skill to such a high degree that the skill has become ‘second nature’. You can perform a task using the skill with little or no effort.
Do the 4 stages have applications in ELT?
I think so. In ELT our goal is to help students achieve Stage 4 (Blue): Unconscious Competence, i.e., the ability to use language effortlessly and smoothly in authentic situations.
Unfortunately, many of us seem to be quite satisfied when our students reach Stage 3 (Green): Conscious Competence. This Stage can help students do very well on examinations but not enough for spontaneous communications. The latter requires fast and subconscious retrieval of implicit language knowledge.
In other words, at Stage 3 students may be able to express themselves in the target language, but they do it haltingly and with frequent and noticeable mistakes.
Stage 4 is characterized by students’ ability to use the language in a wide variety of social and academic contexts quickly and effortlessly. Students make occasional slips but they have excellent control of the language and can use it with a high degree of fluency, accuracy and complexity.
If indeed we want to help our students get to Stage 4, what are some of the critical questions we need to think about? Here are four questions for us to ponder:
- Is it possible to help our students to get to Stage 4?
- If so, how long will it take to get there?
- What language learning approaches are well-suited to support our students?
Is it possible to help students reach Stage 4?
Yes definitely. Repeated observations show that our students can reach Stage 4. These students develop a very high level of proficiency which enables them to use the language with a high degree with fluency and automaticity.
The number however tends to be quite small. In a typical classroom of 50 students, about 10% of them develop an advanced level of competence. The rest are either in Stage 3, or worse, in Stage 2. What we need to do is to gradually increase the number of Stage 4 students to anywhere between 75-80%.
How long will it take to get to Stage 4?
Estimates vary since there are vast differences of the language learning contexts. But ELT professionals believe that students need to spend some 2,000 hours to acquire a new language.
While this amount is considered sufficient, the learning will need to be done in a shorter than a longer period of time. Students are more likely to acquire more language if the learning is done over a 3-year period than over a 10 year period. In other words, intensity of learning can substantially increase the impact of learning.
What language learning approaches are well-suited to support our students to get to Stage 4?
There are essentially two major approaches: (1) teaching language as knowledge and (2) teaching language as ability.
The first approach focuses more on the development of explicit knowledge of the language. The second approach focuses more on the development of implicit knowledge of the language.
While both types of knowledge are important, teachers tend to favour the teaching of explicit knowledge of the language, often to the complete neglect of teaching knowledge as ability.
There is now a greater consensus among ELT experts that if we truly want to help our students reach Stage 4, we need to teach language as ability and provide students with ample opportunities to develop their implicit knowledge of the language.
Further reading