The Secret to Speaking Any Language Like a Native

Mary meets and marries Chai while they’re both studying at a university in the States. After a few years they go to live with Chai’s family in Thailand. It’s a typical extended Thai family: Chai’s parents, brothers and sisters, and all their children. Maybe 20 people who can speak only Thai. Her husband is the only one who can speak English.

After introductions, Chai’s mother smiles at Mary, says something to her in Thai, and waits for an answer. Mary is embarrassed and asks Chai, “What’d she say? What’d she say?” Chai tells her, “She asked you what you think of Thailand. “ Mary then asks him “How do you say ‘I like it very much’?” Chai tells her the Thai for this. Mary doesn’t quite catch the words and asks, “How do you spell that?” She then proceeds to produce a fractured version of the sentence for her mother-in-law.

This kind of struggling continues with slow progress for 2 years, but Mary still can’t understand very much and it’s very hard for others to understand her. She decides to take a course in Thai, but the course and the textbook also consist of telling her ‘What that means’, ‘How you say this’, and ‘How you spell it’. It just does this a lot more professionally than Chai did. She never really learns to use Thai well.

Brown is notable for originating the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) approach to language teaching, which claims that adults can effortlessly become near-native or native-like in second languages if they learn them implicitly through experience, without consciously practicing speaking. Brown came to believe that, contrary to the critical period hypothesis that adults have lost the ability to learn languages as children do, adults actually retain this ability but obstruct it by using abilities they have gained to consciously study, practice, and analyze language.

"[Brown's] goal had always been to find a way for an adult to become native in their second language," says David Long, the coordinator of the AUA Thai Program. Beginning with his study of Thai under Mary Haas using the Army Method, also known as the audiolingual method, Brown sought to prove the effectiveness of study and practice to this end. However, he described being confounded by observations over his years in Thailand of people who had studied Thai for fewer hours than him achieving fluency in less time, while others who had studied more than him taking longer to become fluent.[23] At AUA, Brown devised elaborate drills for Thai learners with the goal of having them speak correct English without thinking, but found that these had no effect on real language use.

Brown experienced a "sudden conversion" upon reading a copy of The Natural Approach by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell that his colleague Adrian S. Palmer gave him the next day. "In 1983, I first came across Krashen's idea that we acquire languages by understanding messages, and in no other way," recalled Brown. "The thing that caught my attention was 'and in no other way.' I was pretty well sold on understanding happenings, but now I could consider ruling out everything else. No memorizing, no practicing, no speaking!"

In 1984, Brown began teaching language using a comprehension approach of listening to comprehensible input, starting with the following semester's Japanese class, then a natural approach Thai class. He returned to Bangkok to give a demonstration term of natural approach Thai to students and observers funded by the United States Information Agency, and was hired by AUA to give natural approach classes along with the regular structural approach classes.

Brown's approach also had two teachers speaking to one another in front of the class, which allowed students to observe interaction in the target language without speaking it themselves. "Students watched two or three Thais act out easy-to-understand scenarios describing Thai customs." wrote author Cleo Odzer of the natural approach Thai classes at AUA in the late 1980s.

According to Brown, students who adhered to the long silent period by first listening to Thai for hundreds of hours without trying to speak were able to surpass the level of fluency he had achieved after several decades in Thailand within just a few years, without study or practice, while other students who tried to speak from the beginning found themselves "struggling with broken Thai like all long-time foreigners." In Brown's view, trying to speak the language before developing a clear mental image through listening had permanently damaged their ability to produce the language like a native speaker.

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