Abstract:

A feature of the modern world is lifelong learning: Any individual may find at any age that they need to learn a new skill for employment or personal reasons. Literature exists in many fields on how to effectively learn the knowledge and skills of that field. There is rather less provision on learning in general, and an interesting question is to what extent learners learning in multiple fields can leverage their experiences in one field to support their learning in another field.
The present exploratory study addresses the learning of the boardgame chess and the learning of foreign languages. It is based on comparisons of the literatures on expertise, chess improvement, second language acquisition, and polyglottism, as well as the current experiences of the author with the learning of chess as well as his language learning experience with European and Asian languages.

Pass and Sweller (2022) have defined learning as "an alteration in long-term memory" (p. 76). They speculate that humans have unlimited long-term memory capacity but point out, following Miller (1956), that working memory is severely limited. An implication of this limit is that it is not possible to integrate a large number of pieces of information on the fly. Thus, the literature on expertise, e.g. Ericsson et al. (2006), tends to characterize the learning problem as developing a sufficiently large repertoire of routines or chunks that can be accessed immediately and applied to practical situations. For example, De Groot (1946/2008) found that a typical chess grandmaster remembers roughly 100,000 chess positions and that the grandmaster is able to match current situations to features of the remembered positions in order to decide the best way to proceed.

In language acquisition research, researchers such as Pawley and Syder (1983) have since the 1980s been moving away from a view of language as a syntactic system where single words can be placed in appropriate slots within sentences ("lexicalised grammar") to the idea that language is fundamentally "grammaticalised lexis" (Lewis, 1993). It is possible to see lexicalised sentence stems and other kinds of formulaic language as being akin to chess positions: A learner has to consolidate the linguistic item in their long-term memory and somehow learn to activate it when its use is called for and adapt it on the fly to the current situation.

It is notable that views on chess improvement are generally consistent across the world and across time, although some evolution is evident as knowledge of chess itself has grown. In contrast, language teaching is marked by periodic revolutions as views on the nature of language have changed. Against this background, it can be difficult for an individual learner to know how to go about the learning task. In this paper, I elaborate the view outlined above and suggest some ways in which language learners might practically put it into practice.

Keywords:

Language learning, second language acquisition, chess, expertise.