Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Final Project
Ill give you a perspective of how my weekly postings and Power of Babel posts reflect my teaching
and learning.
Week I: What Is Language?
For the first of week of Language Development Ive written language is the tool to communicate each
other, express our feelings and carry our messages. We use language to express inner thoughts and
emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thought, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill
our wants and needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture. This is a broad
conceptlanguage is a system that relates sounds or gestures to meaning. Language is expressed
through speech, writing and gesture. Language has to be systematic and conventionalized. Sometimes
language can be complex and specialized skill which develops in the child spontaneously, without
conscious effort or formal instruction and it is more distinct from more general abilities to process
information or behave intelligently.
I agree with the definition that states language develops spontaneously without effort for children. And
it is getting harder and requires more time to learn a language as we grow up. I observe how easy my
daughter can pronounce the words and pick up its meaning and start using it very quickly.
I also think that every language has its own cultural identity. Language without culture and culture
without language is worthless. The culture shapes the language and leaves its tracks in it.
Week II: Critical Period Hypothesis
The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language
acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age.
Children are much quicker at learning a foreign language because their brains are still forming and
accept new information much easier. It seemingly appears that children are able to absorb language and
adapt to common usage at a much more relaxed and viable rate that adults. I knew that children acquire
a language faster than adults and the critical period hypothesis paper proved what I know about
language acquisition and deepened my learning about it. There is a popular belief that children as L2
learners are superior to adults (Scovel 2000), that is, the younger the learner, the quicker the learning
process and the better the outcomes. I think whether or not learning a second language, it is affected by
age when you start.
I start observing my students language skills and saw the difference between age groups. After puberty
students ability to learn a language is decreased. Although some research have pointed out that adults
will learn a language faster initially, however a lot of researches shows that by the time they fully attain
a second language, children outpace adults later on. The biggest thing that makes the differences as far
as the age I would say the accent. If you dont learn the language as a child, your accent will be very
noticeable as an adult. It is much more difficult to form those phonological abilities later on.
I can see these differences by comparing two close languages. These are Anatolian Turkish and
Azerbaijani. Both are originated from same root. Theyre two different dialects of Turkish language.
But over the time both have changed due to cultural isolation after World War I and II and Russians
Iron Curtain.
According to McWorther, language change is a process which occurs very slowly. It gradually
morphs, year by year, generation after generation into its new form. This process can be broken down
into five Principals such as Sound Change, Extension, The Expressive Cycle, Rebracketing and
Semantic Change. In all languages, there is a strong tendency for sounds to erode and disappear over
time. This gradual process starts pronouncing the sounds less distinctly in casual speech. This erosion
has a particularly dramatic effect in that, whereas some sounds in a word serve no particular purpose.