LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING- CH 1

LANGUAGE

If we try to define language, we should take into account the following characteristics:

• Language is systematic
• Language is a set of arbitrary symbols
• Those symbols are primary vocal but also visual
• The symbols have conventionalised meanings to which they refer
• Language is used for communication Language operates in a speech community or culture
• Language is essentially human although possibly not limited to humans
• Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; language and language learning both have
universal characteristics

But only using those pints, it will be a too simple definition because each of them have a whole area behind.

DEFINE LEARNING AND TEACHING

Defining those concepts is more difficult than it looks, a simplified definition can be that learning is the acquisition,
retention and understanding of knowledge of a subject or a skill. In order to do this, the learner not only will make use
of storage systems, memory and cognitive organization; but also, will practice and be consciously focused on and
acting upon events outside or inside the organism.

Teaching on the other hand, is showing, helping, guiding someone in order to continue in the process of learning or
making a little easier the process. This can be done by giving instructions, providing knowledge or information,
showing how to do something, or any other action to set the conditions for learning. Your understanding of how the
learner learns will determine your teaching style and methods as well as your techniques.

THREE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

There are 3 schools of thought: Structuralism/ behaviourism, rationalism and cognitive psychology and constructivism.

STRUCTURALISM/ BEHAVIOURISM

Structuralism: This approach implied that language teaching was centered on grammatical aspects, and in learning
formal linguistic elements and rules. Only by means of this knowledge, are speakers able to use language correctly.
Along with these studies, there was research in psychology, especially within the behaviourist approach.

Behaviourism: According to this approach, language is acquired due to the stimuli present in the environment, and to
which children respond. For example, an adult uses a word that refers to an object. This action provokes a particular
response. Through the repetition of this process, children get to know the meaning of a word, and to use a linguistic
stimulus to obtain a response. Although this approach has been considered controversial, it emphasizes important
imitative components of the learning process.

RATIONALISM AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

They maintain that learning cannot be equated with behaviour because observed behaviour is only the outward
manifestation of internal changes, which the organism may have undergone as a result of learning. Yet, these internal
changes are not in themselves observable.

Saussure (1916) claimed that there was a difference between parole (what skinner “observes” and performance for
Chomsky) and langue (competence or our underlying and unobservable language ability). Cognitive psychologist
asserted that meaning, understanding and knowing were significant data for psychological study. They didn’t focus on
stimulus-response connections, they tried to discover psychological principles of organization and functioning.
CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivists argue that all humans construct their own version of reality, and therefore multiple contrasting ways of
knowing and describing are equally legitimate. Learners build the reality based on personal experiences and through
social interactions that social cultural factors, collaborative group work, guided learning build in personal experience.

FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION- CH 2

THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Small babies can communicate by vocally and nonvocally, sending and receiving lot of messages. When they reach
their first year, they start imitating sound and using simple words, by about 18 months of age they start using two-
word and three-word “sentences” (e.g. bye-bye daddy). With the time they begin to use more and more words every
day, by the age of three they are able to have conversations and when at school age kids not only learn what to say
but what not to say as they learn the social function of the language.

In order to explain this process, we can adopt different positions depending on the theory that we use in an attempt
to answer the questions of the language acquisition. For example, if we use the schools of thoughts, a behaviourist
would claim that children came to the world with a tabula rasa (mentally, a human infant was a blank slate, with no
prior knowledge or ideas) and then they are sharped by the environment.

BEHAVIOURISTIC APPROACHES

The behaviourist approach focused on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behaviour and the
relationship between those responses and events in the world surrounding them. They consider they effective
language behaviour to be the product of correct responses to stimuli.

Skinner’s theory (Verbal Behaviour, 1957) was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant condition (this
one refers to conditioning in which the organism emits a response or operant without necessarily observable stimuli,
that operant/response is maintained/ learned by reinforcement). He says that verbal behaviour is, like other
behaviour, controlled by its consequences, when consequences are rewarding, the behaviour is maintained, but if
they are punishing then the behaviour is extinguished. The problem with this theory is that there are sentences that
you speak or write that have never been heard before.

In an attempt to broaden the behaviourist theory, some psychologists tried to modifies some positions. On of them
was the meditation theory, in which meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistics stimulus elicits a
“meditating” response that is self-stimulating. But this also left many questions unanswered.

Another attempt to use this theory was admitting that their conjectures were “speculative” and “premature”, and
that it could only be applied to child language but it failed to account for the abstract nature of language, the child’s
creativity and the interactive nature of language acquisition.

NATIVIST APPROACH

The term nativist is derived form fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined, that we
were born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us.

Chomsky (1965) claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain why the child could master a native
language in such short time despite the highly abstract nature of language. According to Chomsky, this innate
knowledge was in a “little black box” called language acquisition device (LAD). Here are some properties (McNeill):

1- The ability to distinguish speech sound from other sounds in the environment.
2- The ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can be later redefined
3- Knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible
4- The ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing linguistic system so as to construct the simplest
possible system out of the available linguistic input
Recently, researchers have been focused on what is known as Universal Grammar. It says that all humans are
genetically equipped with abilities to acquire language, the LAD notion was then expanded to a system of universal
rules that went beyond what was originally proposed. They want to discover what is that all children regardless of
their environmental stimuli (the language they hear around them) bring to the language acquisition process. UG
studies: question formation, negation, word order, discontinuity, subject deletion and other grammatical phenomena.

Research has shown that the child’s linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer “incorrect”
structures or mistakes. Rather, the child’s language at any stage is systematic, the child is always forming hypotheses
on the basis of the input received and then testing those hypotheses in the speech. Then those hypotheses are revise,
reshaped or abandoned.

The generative framework was a departure from structural methodology, this model is considered as giant stap in the
process of LA. The early grammars of child language were referred to as pivot grammars. Child’s first two-word
utterances are classified as pivot and open words. Example: My cap, my (pivot word) cap (open word).

FUNCTIONAL APPROACHES

With an increase in constructivist approach to the study of language, two emphases have emerged:

a. Researchers began to see that language was one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal
with the world, with others and with.
b. The generative rules expressed on the nativist approach were abstract, formal explicit, and logical but they
dealt specifically with the forms of language (morphemes, words, sentences, etc) and not with deeper
functional levels of meaning (meaningful, interactive purposes, within social context, that we accomplish
with the forms) constructed from social interaction.

COGNITION ANG LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Dan Slobin (1971) demonstrated that in all languages, semantic learning depends on the cognitive development. The
language development has 2 principles: (1) the functional level: communicative capacities, operating in conjunction
with innate schemas of cognition and (2) the formal level: information-processing capacities, operating in conjunction
with innate schemas of grammar.

SOME EXTRA WORDS

• Competence: As one of the issues in first language acquisition, refers to the explicit knowledge of a system,
event or fact. It’s the nonobservable ability to do or perform something.

• Production: It can be an aspect of both performance and competence. It’s mostly related to speaking and
writing because by doing those tasks is how we can transmit the language.

• Input: It refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources,
including parental speech, the speech of older siblings, the teacher’s, and the environment around the learner.

• Tabula rasa: It is what the extreme behaviorists claim that children come into the world with. They say that
children are born with no previous notions about language, all is learned and sharped by the environment.

• Universal Grammar: This research says that all human languages are constructed on the same, abstract
template, and that this explains why all normal speakers acquire their native language quickly and accurately.

• LAD: Language acquisition device, is the “place” where our knowledge is embodied. It has four innate
linguistic properties: the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds, the ability to organize
linguistic data into classes that can be redefined, a knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is
possible and that other kinds are not, and the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing
linguistic system.