LANGUAGE:

Is “a sistematic means of communicating ideas or feeling by the use of

convensationalized sings, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood
meaning”.

LEARNING:

Is “acquiring knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or

instruction”.

Is the process of acquiring new, or modifying

existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences.

TEACHING:

May be defined as “showing or helping someone to learn how to do

something, giving instructions, guiding in the study of something,
providing with knowledge, causing to know or understand”.

STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS AND BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGY:

The linguistic task, according to the structuralist, was to describe human

language and to identify their structural characteristics. An important
axion of structural linguistics was that language can differ from each
other without limit, and that no preconceptions should apply across
languages.

Of further importance to the structural or descriptive linguist was the

notion that languages could be dismantled into small pieces or units and
that these units could be described scientitifically, contrasted, and added
up again to form the whole.

In the behavioral paradigm, any notion of “idea” or “meaning” was

“explanatory fiction” and in both language and other behavior, the only
legitimate “responses” were those that could be objectively perceived,
recorded, and measured.
GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:

In the decade of the 1960s, generative transformational linguistics

emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky and a number of his
colleagues. Chomsky was trying to show that human language cannot
be scrutinized simply in the terms of observable stimuli and responses or
the volumes of raw data gathered by field linguists. The generative
linguist was interests not only in describing language (achieving the
level of descriptive adequacy) but also in arriving at a “principled
basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the
descriptively adequate grammar of ach language”

Cognitive psychologists like generative linguists, sought to discover

underlying motivations and deeper structures of human behavior by
using a rational approach. That is, they freed themselves from the strictly
empirical study typical of behaviorists and employed the tools of logic,
reason, extrapolation, and inference in order to derive explanations for
human behavior. For cognitive psychologists, going beyond merely
descriptive adequacy to explanatory power took on the utmost
importance.

CONSTRUCTIVISM:

Is the hardly a new school of thought. Piaget and Vygotsky, name often
associated with constructivism, are no by any means new to the scene
of language studies. Yet, in the variety of post structuralist theoretical
positions, constructivism emerged as a paradigm of intense interest in
the last part of the twentieth century.

What is constructivism, and how does it differ from the other two
viewpoints described above? First, it will be helpful to think of two
branches of constructivism: cognitive and social. In cognitive
constructivism, emphasis is placed on the importance of learners
constructing they own representation of reality and Social
constructivism emphasizes the importance of social interaction and
cooperative learning in ultimate attainment. Note that constructivist
research tends to focus on “individuals engaged in social practices… on
a collaborative group, or a global community”.
ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT (ZPD):

One of most popular advanced by Vygotsky was the notion of a zone of

proximal development (ZPD): the distance between learners existing
developmental state and their potential development. Put another way,
the ZPD encompasses tasks that a learner has not yet learned but is
capable of learning with appropriate stimuli. The ZPD is an important
facet of social constructivism because it involves task “that a child
cannot yet do alone but could do with the assistance of more
competence peers or adults”.

Vygotsky’s concept of the ZPD contracted rather sharply with Piaget’s

theory learning in that the former saw a unity of learning and
development while the latter saw stages of development setting a
preconditions or readiness of learning. Piaget stressed the importance of
individual cognitive development as a relatively solitary act.

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUANGE TEACHING (CLT)

In that term are captured many of the pedagogical springs and rivers of
the last few decades, now a catchphrase for language teachers. CLT, to
be discussed further in chapter 8, is an eclectic blend of previous
methods into the best of what a teacher can provide in authentic uses of
a L2 in the classroom. Indeed, the single greatest challenge in the
profession is to move significantly beyond the teaching of rules, patterns,
definitions, and others knowledge “about” language to the point that we
are teaching our students to communicate genuinely, spontaneously,
and meaningfully in the L2.

METHOD:

 A particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching

something, especially a systematic or established one.
 The quality of being well organized and systematic in thought or
action.

As they conceived of in many ages, are too narrow and too constructive
to apply to a wide range of learners in enormous number of situational
contexts. There are no instant recipes. No quick and easy method is
guaranteed to provide success.

APPROACH:

 Come near or nearer to (someone or something) in distance

or time.
 Come close to (a number, level, or standard) in quality or
quantity.
 Speak to (someone) for the first time about a proposal or
request.
 Start to deal with (a situation or problem) in a certain way.

In which every learners, every teacher, and every context is unique. Your
task as a teacher is to understand the properties of those contexts.
Then, using a cautious, enlightened, eclectic approach, you can build a
set of foundation stones, a theory, or a set of perspective based on
principles of L2 learning and teaching.

TECHNIQUE:

 A way of carrying out a particular task, especially the execution or

performance of an artistic work or a scientific procedure.
 A skilful or efficient way of doing or achieving something.

BEHAVIORAL APPROACH:

A behavioral perspective of course easily explains such exchanges as

the result of an emitted or stimulated “response” that is immediately
rewarded (reinforced), thereby encouraging (stimulating) further linguistic
attempts from the child.

In children, behavioral psychologist look at immediately perceptible

aspects of linguistic behavior, what they might call “publicly observable
responses” and the associations between those responses and
perceived rewards in the world surrounding them. “Effective” language
behavior is seen as the production of desired responses to stimuli. If a
particular response is rewarded, it then becomes habitual, or
conditioned.
THE NATIVIST APPROACH:

The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that

language acquisition is innately determined, that we are born with a
genetic capacity that predisposes us to a sistematic perception of
language around us, resulting in the construction of an internalized
system of language. One of the more practical contributions of nativist
theories is evident if you look at the kinds of discoveries that have been
made about how the system of child language works. Research has
shown that the child´s language at any given point is a legitimate system
in its own right.

FUNCTIONAL APPROACH:

Is considered to be the second paradigm of psychology. This idea

focuses on the function of the mental processes which involves
consciousnesses. (Gordon, 1995) This approach was developed by
William James in 1890. James was the first American Psychologist and
wrote the first general textbook regarding psychology. In this approach
he reasoned that the mental act of consciousness must be an important
biological function (Schechter et al., 2011) He also noted that it was a
psychologist's job to understand these functions so they can discover
how the mental process operates. This idea was an alternative approach
to the structuralism, which was the first paradigm (Gordon, 1995).

In second language acquisition (SLA) functional approaches are of

similarities with Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG). Focus is on the
use of language in real situations (performance), as well as underlying
knowledge (competence).
SOCIAL INTERACTION AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT:
The social interaction language acquisition theory is about the child’s
experience which influences language acquisition. Language
researchers believe that children everywhere arrive in the world with
special social and linguistic capacities. A child acquires language
development by environmental influences and parents who provide rich
environments enable many positive benefits, this means that parents
who pay attention to their children’s language expands on their child’s
utterances and by reading to their children will expand on their language.

COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE:

 Competence refers to one’s underlying knowledge of a system,

event, or fact. It is the nonobservable ability to do something, to
perform something.
 Performance is the overtly observable and concrete manifestation,
or realization, of competence. It is the actual doing of something:
walking, singing, dancing, speaking.

The Competence-performance distinction is exemplified in all walks

of life. In businesses, workers are expected to perform their job’s
“competently” that is to exhibit skills that match their expected
competence.

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION:

Comprehension is the words and word combinations that children

understand (listening, reading) must not be equated with competence.

Production is the words and word combinations that children use

(speaking, writing) be thought of only as performance.
Human being have the competence (the internal unobservable mental
and physical “writing”) both to understand and t produce language. We
also perform acts of listening and reading just as surely as we perform
acts of speaking and writing. Don’t let the beginnings the two pairs of
words confuse you!

Distinction between Comprehension and Production:

At all ages in life, comprehension develops ahead of production. There is

a five-month lag between the time toddlers can comprehend 50 words
and the time that they can actually produce that many. Comprehension
requires children to recognize the meaning of a word. But in the light of
production, children must recall or actively retrieve from their memories.
They not only have to remember the word but also the meaning of the
word. These two concepts are still related. When a child's speed and
accuracy of word comprehension is faster then they show a more rapid
growth of words understood and later produced.
NATURE AND NURTURE:

 Nature refers to all of the genes and hereditary factors that

influence who we are—from our physical appearance to our
personality characteristics.

Nature provides innately, in some sort of predetermined biological

timetable.

 Nurture refers to all the environmental variables that impact who

we are, including our early childhood experiences, how we were
raised, our social relationships, and our surrounding culture.

IMPUT:

 Consists of information or resources that a group

or project receives.

Input ha becomes a “hot topic” in SL.A, and of course role of input in the
child’s acquisition of language is undeniably crucial.

Some linguists have claimed that a child’s input is often semi-

grammatical and full of performance variable, and that children are
exposed to “a haphazard sample” of language.

At the same time it should be remembered that children react very

consistently to the deep structure and the communicative function of the
language, and they do no reacts overtly to expansion and grammatical
corrections, as in the “nobody don’t like me” dialogue quoted earlier.

HEMISPHERIC LATERALIZATION:

Several decades ago researcher were favoring lateralization of the

brain as the key to answering such a question. There evidence in
neurological research that as the human brain matures, certain function
are assigned, or “lateralized”, to the left hemisphere of the brain, and
certain other functions to the right hemisphere, while the right
hemisphere controls functions related to emotional and social needs.
SOCIOBIOLOGICAL CRITICAL PERIOD:

Evidence suggests that there is a critical, or at least a sensitive, period

for language acquisition, which ends around puberty. The existence of
this period is explained by an evolutionary model which assumes that (a)
linguistic ability is in principle (if not in practice) measurable, and (b) the
amount of language controlled by an individual conferred selective
advantage on it. In this model, the language faculty is seen as adaptive,
favored by natural selection, while the critical period for language
acquisition itself is not an adaptation, but arises from the interplay of
genetic factors influencing life-history characters in relation to language
acquisition. The evolutionary model is implemented on a computer and
simulations of populations evolving under various plausible, if idealized,
conditions result in clear critical period effects, which end around
puberty.

AFFECTIVE CONSIDERATIONS:

The affecting domain includes many factors: empathy, self-esteem,

extroversion, inhibition, imitations, anxiety, attitudes—the list could go
on. Some of these may seem at first rather far removed from language
learning, but when we consider the pervasive nature of language and
the centrality of our emotions, any affective factor can be relevant to L2
learning.

THE NATURAL APPROACH:

Krashen and Terrell have identified the Natural Approach with what they
call "traditional" approaches to language teaching. Traditional
approaches are defined as "based on the use of language in
communicative situations without recourse to the native language" - and,
perhaps, needless to say, without reference to grammatical analysis,
grammatical drilling, or to a particular theory of grammar. Krashen and
Terrell note that such "approaches have been called natural,
psychological, phonetic, new, reform, direct, analytic, imitative and so
forth" (Krashen and Terrell 1983: 9). The fact that the authors of the
Natural Approach relate their approach to the Natural Method has led
some to assume chat Natural Approach and Natural Method are
synonymous terms. Although the tradition is a common one, there are
important differences between the Natural Approach and the older
Natural Method, which it will be useful to consider at the outset.

The natural approach simulated child language acquisition though the

use of TPR activities at the beginning level.

MEANINGFUL LEARNING AND ROTE LEARNING:

Meaningful learning is the best understood by contrasting it with rote

learning. Ausubel described rote learning as the process of acquiring
material as “discrete and relatively isolated entities” (1968, p_108) that
have little or no association with exiting cognitive structure.

Ausubel described human learning as a meaningful process of relating

(associating) new events or items to already existing cognitive structure.

On the other hand, meaningful learning or subsumption may be

described as a process of relating and anchoring new material to
relevant established entities in cognitive structure.

TRANSFER AND INTERFERENCE:

Transfer usually refers to the carryover of previous performance or

knowledge to subsequent learning. (It can also apply to the effect of a
current act of learning on previously learned material, which is known as
retroactive transfer, but we’ll deal with that in a moment.) Positive
transfer occur s when the prior knowledge benefits the learning task—
that is, when a previous item is correctly applied to present subject
matter. Negative transfer occurs when previous performance disrupts or
inhibits the performance of a second task. The latter can be referred to
as interference, in that previously learned material conflict with
subsequent material—a previous item is incorrectly transferred or on
correctly associated with an item to be learned.

OVERGENERALIZATION:

In the literature on SLA, interference is almost as frequent a term as

overgeneralization, which is simply a form of negative transfer.
Generalization involves inferring or deriving a law, rule, or conclusion
from the observation of particular instances. In term of the previous
discussed meaningful learning, items are subsumed (generalized) under
higher-order categories for meaningful retention.
 In a SLA it is customary to refer to overgeneralization as a process that
occurs as the L2 learner acts within the target language, generalizing a
particular rule or term in the L2 ---irrespective of the L1—beyond
legitimate bounds.

LENGUAGE APTITUDE:

Potential is Language aptitude refers to the potential that a person has

for learning languages. This often evaluated using formal aptitude tests,
which predict the degree of success the candidate will have with a new
language. Aptitude tests vary but many include evaluation of ability to
manage sounds, grammatical structures, infer rules, and memory.

Example
The Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) evaluates language
aptitude.

In the classroom language aptitude may be fixed but there are many
things teachers can do in the area of learner training to improve the
learner's ability. These include helping learners identify their preferences
for learning; thinking about learning styles, and then looking at how
these can be developed; and developing learner autonomy by teaching
learners how to study effectively.

INTELIGENCE AND LENGUAGE LEARNING:

Intelligence was considered as a concept devoid of emotion and

symposium on intelligence over the years repeatedly concluded that the
first hallmark of intelligence is high-level mental ability such as abstract
reasoning (Sternberg 1997). While Terman (1921; cited in Sternberg
1997: 339), states that “an individual is intelligent in proportion as he is
able to carry on abstract thinking”. Therefore, intelligence conceptualized
as abstract thinking was demonstrated to predict academic success.
In relating intelligence to second language learning, Brown (1994: 93)
states that in the past it was conceived that “the greatest barrier to
second language learning seemed to boil down to a matter of memory”,
in the sense that if a student could remember something he or she was
exposed to, he or she would be a successful language learner because
intelligence was traditionally defined and measured in terms of linguistic
and logical-mathematical abilities. Based on this, it is clear that
intelligence contributes to successful language learning.