UNIDAD No.

01
Language, Learning and Teaching/First Language
Acquisition
Dr. Isaias Santana

Santo Domingo, D.N.

2019
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Table of Content

1. Questions about SLA

2. Linguistic Factors

3. Learning Processes

4. Learning Process

5. Age and Acquisition

6. Classroom Instruction

7. Learning and Teaching

8. Three Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition

9. Nineteen Centuries of Language Teaching

10. Language Teaching in the Twentieth Century

11. Theories of the First Language Acquisition

12. Issues in First language Acquisition

13. L1-Acqusition -Inspired Methods

3
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Introduction to Unit I
The act of learning a second language is a demanding process and time

consuming. Students must devote all your efforts to internalize a target language code,

sounds, grammar, syntax, and culture. It is mandatory a total commitment, involving

physical, intellectual and emotional dedication to obtain the final goal, consisting in

effective communication. This human activity is influenced by many variables. Thus, it can

be said that is a complex task due to the number of variables impacting in language

internalization.

4
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Content Development

There are some key concepts n the field of Second language acquisition (SLA) generating research

questions of great importance. Those terms are:

Learners characteristics. This human feature relates to personality factors, ethnic,

linguistic and religious heritage. These issues should take into consideration when developing a

program or a syllabus. Besides, teachers should pay attention to weaknesses and strength, abilities,

and intellectual capacities.

Linguistics factors. These characteristics show what, how and why the learner must learn as

well as the differences about first language (FL) and second language (SL) acquisition. One key

question to find out by English teachers is what characteristic of the language the learner faces

difficulty in retention.

Learning process. This feature of SLA relates to types of strategies are effective for the

learner and the factors associated to input exposure, attention to form and meaning, memory and the

retention process.

Age and acquisition. This factor refers about the differences between children and grownups

in SLA process. It is of outmost importance the fact that differentiate between fast learners and slow

learners, observing children and adult learner differences.

5
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Instructional Variables. What are the ingredients for success? What are the effects of

methodological approaches, textbooks, materials, teacher styles, and institutional factors?

Context. Are the learners attempting to acquire the second language within the cultural and

linguistic milieu of second language, that is, in a ‘second’’ language situation in the technical sense

of the term? Or are they focusing on a ‘’foreign’’ language context in which the second language is

heard and spoken only in an artificial environment, such as the modern language classroom in an

American university or high school?

Purpose. Why are the learners attempting to acquire the second language? What are their

purposes? Are they motivated by achievement of successful career, or by passing a foreign language

requirement, or by wishing to identify closely with the culture and people of the target language?

What other emotional, personal, or intellectual reasons do learners have for pursuing this gigantic

task of learning another language?

Language. The concept of language should adopt some definitions. These definitions,

however, limit its scope. According to Brown (2008), this concept can be dismantled into many

features, such as

1. “Language is systematic.”

2. “Language is a set of arbitrary symbols.”

3. “Those symbols are primarily vocal but may also be visual.

4. “Language is used for communication.”

6
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

5. “Language operates in a speech community or culture.”

6. “Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.”

7. “Language is acquired by all people in much the same way” (p.6)

Another concept that can be analyzed about its features is learning. Breaking down into it core

elements can be seen as:

1. “Learning is acquisition or getting.”

2. “Learning is retention of information or skill.”

3. “Retention implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organization.”

4. “Learning involves active, conscious focus on and acting upon events outside

or inside the organism.”

5. “Learning is relatively permanent but subject to forgetting.”

6. “Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice.”

7. “Learning is a change in behavior.”

After studying these concepts, it would be recommended for the new coming teacher to

understand what teaching means. Brown (2008) posited that “teaching is the process of attending to

7
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

people’s needs, experiences and feelings, and making specific interventions to help them to learn

particular things.”

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

While the general definitions of language, learning, and teaching offered above might meet

with the approval of most linguists, psychologists, and educators, points of disagreement become

apparent after a little probing of the components of each definition. For example, is language

primarily a “system of formal units” or a “means for social interaction”? Or, for better retention,

should a teacher emphasize extrinsic or intrinsic motivation in students? Differing viewpoints

emerge from equally knowledgeable scholars, usually over the extent to which one viewpoint or

another should receive primacy.

Structural Linguistics and Behavioral Psychology

In the 1940s and 1950s, the structural, or descriptive, school of linguistics, with its

advocates—Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles Hockett, Charles Fries, and others—prided

itself in a rigorous application of scientific observations of human languages. Only “publicly

observables responses” could be subject to investigation. The linguist's task, according to the

structuralist, was to describe human languages and to identify the structural characteristics of those

languages.

8
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

A behavioral paradigm also focused on publicly observable responses—those that can be

objectively perceived, recorded, and measured. The scientific method was rigorously adhered to,

and therefore such concepts as consciousness and intuition were regarded as mentalistic, illegitimate

domains of inquiry.

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 followers. Chomsky was trying to show that

human language cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of observables stimuli and responses of the

volumes of raw data gathered by field linguists.

Both the structural linguist and the behavioral psychologist were interested in description, in

answering what question about human behavior: objective measurement of behavior in controlled

circumstances. The generative linguist and cognitive psychologist were, to be sure, interested in the

what question; but they were far more interested in a more ultimate question, why: what underlying

factors—innate, psychological, social, or environmental circumstances—caused a behavior in a

human being?

9
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Constructivism a Multidisciplinary Approach

Constructivism is a school of thought that emphasizes both the learner’s role in constructing

meaning out of available linguistic input and the importance of social interaction in creating a new

linguistic system.

Early constructivists like Vygotsky and Piaget actively emphasized their views many

decades ago.

What took the language teaching profession so long to apply such thinking to classroom

practices?

Grammar Translation Method

Latin was thought by means of what has been called Classical Method focus on:

Grammatical rules.

Memorization of texts.

Doing written exercises

10
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

As other languages began to be taught in educational institutions in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, the classical Method was adopted as the chief means for teaching foreign

languages.

Late in nineteenth century, the classical Method came to be known as the Grammar

Translation Method. There was Little to distinguish Grammar Translation from what had gone on in

foreign language classrooms for centuries, beyond a focus on grammatical rules as the basic for

translating from the second to the native language.

Prator and Celce-Murcia (1979) listed the major characteristics of Grammar

Translation:

1. Class taught in the mother tongue; Little use of L2.

2. Much vocabulary taught in the form of lists of isolated words.

3. Elaborate explanations of the intricacies of grammar.

4. Reading of difficult classical texts begun early.

5. Texts treated as exercises in grammatical analyses.

6. Occasional drills and exercises in translating sentences from L1 to L2.

11
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

7. Little or no attention to pronunciation.

First Language Acquisition

Introduction

The way in which children learn the first language before their five years of life has amazed

human being for centuries. Language teaching is not the exception to this trend and the educators’

main goal was to articulate a teaching methodology to deliver language teaching in a

12
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

comprehensible fashion allowing students to retain not only the language code but also

communication strategies.

The first language researchers to do that were Dietrich Tiedemann who recorded his young

son’s psychological and linguistic development observation and Francois Gouin who observed how

his nephew passed the language acquisition stages successfully. After those observation, Language

teachers around the world started to develop a great number of language teaching methods known

as “the series method of foreign language teaching.

Theories of First Language Acquisition

The features that allowed children to communicate in L1 have been studied by linguistics

and psychologies. Thus, they theories and believes have adopted to polarized positions to study first

language acquisition. According to Brown (2014) the first claim is held by the “Behaviorist position

which claim that children come into the world with a tabula rasa”. This means that children come to

the world without any traits or preconceived notions, so they are modeled by their setting and

conditioned thru reinforcement. The second extreme is divided into two positions: The first,

according to this author, is that “children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge,

predispositions, and biological timetables”; the second refers that children learn to function in a

language chiefly through interaction and discourse” (p.23).

13
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

Behavioral Approaches

This perspective explains when children produce responses which are reinforced either

negative or positive. These reinforces will be responsible for children’ acquisition process. Thus, a

positive reinforced will make children to continue using the utterance and internalize; whereas a

negative reinforce will stop children from using the produced responses. Brown (2014) posited that

“a behavioral view claims that a child demonstrates comprehension of an utterance by responding

appropriately to it, and then upon reinforcement children internalize linguistic meaning” (p.24).

This means that language acquisition in children is ruled by the system of rewards.

One of the first psychologist studying language acquisition was Skinner. He posited a theory

well known as operant conditioning. It refers to “conditioning in which the organism emits a

response or operant, without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is kept by reinforcement”

(p.24).

14
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor
Unidad 01: Language, Learning and Teaching/First language Acqusition

References
Brown, H. D. (2014). Principles of language learning and teaching (6th ed.). United
States: Pearson Education. Recuperado de https://epdf.tips/principles-of-language-
learning-and-teaching-5th-edition.html

Videos
https://www.coursera.org/lecture/language-theories/video-7-summary-v58Uo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvOIbDI2fro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnyyeBfP9iU

15
Autor/a: Nombre del Autor