PrincipleS and

TheoriES in

LaNGUAge
Module 1 AcqUISition
Prepared by:
Prof. Archie L. Ferrer
CED Faculty
College of Principles & Theories of Language Acquisition &
Education Learning

Module 1 Principles & Theories of Language Acquisition & Learning

Introduction
This course provides an avenue for the pre-service English teachers to
examine and demonstrate content knowledge on the principles, factors, and contexts
of language acquisition and learning based on theories and research findings.
Moreover, this course enables them to explore and analyze the relationship of
language learning principles and theories to classroom practice. They are expected
to create a Language Acquisition Model/Framework integrating the relationship of
language acquisition and learning with the view of improving language instruction.

Overview

This modules introduces the nature of human language to students with its
comprehensive presentation. Major in field as diverse as teaching English as a
second language, foreign language studies and professional and general education
will enjoy learning this module 1. Much of the information will enable students to gain
insight and understanding about linguistic issues and debates appearing in the
national media, and will help professors and students stay current with important
linguistic developments and try to dispel certain common misconceptions that people
have about language development.

1
Lesson 1 THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE AND LEARNING

Lesson Outcomes (Objectives)

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. define language and learning according to different authorities

2. discuss how one’s understanding of language determines how once teaches it.
3. share their insights on how one’s understanding of the way a learner learns
determine one’s philosophy of education, teaching style, approach,
methods, and classroom techniques.
Excite (Activity)

1. Look at the illustration. Do you think this is true? Why?

2. How did different nationalities able to communicate around the world?

Explore (Topic Discussion)

What is language?

Language is the primary method of human communication, but there are also other
ways to communicate without the use of language. When asked to define language
we tend to think of a verbal and written system in which certain sounds and symbols
come together in a specific way to convey meaning. Language in its most complex
form is unique to humans, although some animals have been found to have basic
communication patterns. Languages often have verbal and written components, but
how we classify something like American Sign Language? Animals manage to
communicate — do they have language? How did language evolve? How do we
learn

Language learning
Language learning is broadly defined as developing the ability to communicate in the
second / foreign language, and in this context includes:
 Language learning for specialists. This includes programs which not only teach
language but also a variety of subject ‘content’ related to language such as
literature, culture, history and politics at BA or MA level. This also covers
programs and courses involving the teaching of translating and interpreting.

 Language learning for non‐specialists or service languages. This includes

language teaching options which are available to all interested students, some of
which may have a focus on specific topics (e.g. German for Law) or on the
enhancement of selected skills (e.g. effective speaking skills). Also included are
programs in which language is a minor part and predominately relates to the
learning of language skills rather than related ‘content’ studies, as outlined above
(language learning for specialists). This type of language learning is often offered
under an Institution Wide Language Programme (IWLP).

 Languages for instruction (including the teaching of the language/s of a host

university to non‐native speakers), where the target language is normally used as
the language of instruction. For many institutions in the EU this will often relate to
the teaching of courses through the medium of English. This is described more
fully in section 2.4 Content and language integrated learning (CLIL).

 Language learning for social purposes. This includes language learning for
mobility or where the local language is taught as a foreign language to incoming
students. It also relates to language learning for employability, travel (holidays or
living abroad) or for heritage/family reasons. In some cases language learning of
this type will take place as part of continuing or adult education delivered by
higher education institutions.

Knowledge, understanding and skills (competences)

Having completed a first cycle higher education programme of language study in

higher education, students should have acquired:

 the ability to use the target language(s) as a medium for understanding,

expression and communication
 explicit knowledge of the language (knowledge of language structures and
language systems, awareness of lexico‐grammatical issues)
 awareness of languages as a means of communication (discourse)
 awareness of the norms governing the social dimension of languages
(sociolinguistic aspects)
 intercultural awareness and ways of developing experiences which involve
exchanges and interaction between different cultural perspectives (see
intercultural communication sections)
 effective language learning strategies
 an ability to mediate between languages (where translation/interpreting forms part
of the curriculum)

Students who have acquired such knowledge and understanding will be expected to
demonstrate the capacity for:
 communication in the target language using the full range of linguistic skills
(speaking, reading, writing, listening)
 appropriate use of the language in a range of contexts and for a range of purposes
 use of the appropriate metalanguage for linguistic description
 appropriate use of reference material and other sources e.g. grammars and
dictionaries
 lifelong language learning
 self‐directed learning (learner autonomy)

Teaching, learning and assessment

Below is a list of some of the common and/or emerging practices in teaching and
assessment in languages

“Languages are:
 a medium of understanding, expression and communication, described here as
the use of the target language
 an object of study in their own right, described as explicit knowledge of language
 a gateway to relate thematic studies comprising various bodies of knowledge and
methodological approaches, described here as knowledge of the cultures,
communities and societies where the language is used
 a means of access to other societies and culture, described here as intercultural
awareness and understanding”

Teaching and learning

Currently different approaches to language teaching and learning coexist, ranging

from the traditional (teacher‐centered) to the more innovative (use of IT and
emphasis on self‐managed learning). Both can be valuable and effective: much
depends on the context of the teaching and learning, which is influenced by
availability of resources, financial support and opportunities for professional
development/training of language teachers.

More traditional (teacher‐centred) approaches:

Students are less likely to become autonomous learners or to be key players in the
construction of their knowledge.

What this means for language learning:

 focus on formal learning: accuracy is more important than fluency and
development of language strategies
 separate approach to the learning of language skills sometimes resulting in a
higher development of receptive language skills compared with productive
language skills (e.g. after an extended period of language of tuition a learner may
struggle to communicate orally in everyday situations such as on holiday)
 technology (audio cassettes; DVDs) used as extra support for class teaching or,
as in the case of interactive exercises in computer‐based language learning,
used for individual training of grammar, vocabulary and listening or reading skills,
but not to support interaction
 learning a foreign language often in a monolingual/monocultural context.
Students are less likely to be engaged in mobility or offered opportunities for
native speaker interaction
 a unilingual approach to language learning (unilingual = learning a language as
an isolated phenomenon)

More innovative (learner‐centred) approaches:

Student‐centred methods whereby the student is, for example, encouraged to use
research skills to find their own learning material. Integration of independent learning
methods whereby self-study is combined with taught face‐to‐face courses.

What this means for language learning:

 use of methods such as the communicative approach to language learning which

puts emphasis on practical/functional use of language
 study abroad programmes which enable the learner to acquire the foreign
language in context and which promote the social dimension of language learning
 self‐assessment methods aligned to learner‐centred instruments such as the
Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF), or the
European Language Portfolio (ELP) which also support greater learner autonomy
and greater comparability of competencies across Europe
 learning a foreign language in a multilingual/multicultural context using methods
such as tandem learning (cross‐cultural and linguistic exchange between native
speakers of different target languages)
 encouragement to make active use of the language at early stages to put
emphasis on communication (communicative language learning, see above)
 supporting the student in identifying his/her preferred learning styles/methods
(personalized learning), in progressing at his/her own pace, in developing as a
lifelong learner and in acquiring language learning strategies for future learning
 use of technology to support interaction (e.g. communication/social networking
tools (audiovisual or written interaction) or collaborative writing tools such as wikis
 multilingual approaches whereby students are encouraged to transfer previous
language learning knowledge and skills, e.g. identifying links between languages
 focus on informal aspects of language learning e.g. use of the language outside
the classroom in contexts such as Language Cafés, clubs, cultural events etc.
 collaborative approach to the development and delivery of language courses (e.g.
cross‐cultural courses)

Assessment

The use of assessment by oral and / or written exams, administered by expert

language teachers is the predominant form of assessment in languages. Some
universities also use language tests provided by external providers, especially with
non‐specialist students. There is also some evidence of the use of computer‐based
tests. In most universities, exit levels for non‐specialist students have already been
defined, or are in the process of being defined according to CEF levels. This is not
always the case for specialist students. Some university language centres and
language departments use the CEF and CEF‐related instruments, such as the
European Language Portfolio (ELP) to achieve transparency and comparability of
learning outcomes and to foster autonomous learning and language awareness
among learners.

Experience (Formative Assessment)

1. Go to this site and summarize what have the speakers commented:

2. What are the different types of language learning? Where do you belong?

3. As a pre-service teacher, differentiate language teaching and language learning?

Lesson 2 THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE (L1) ACQUISITION

Lesson Outcomes (Objectives)

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. explain the theories and stages of first language

2. examine different cases on how a child learns their first language.
3. cite scenarios on how parents, teachers, and the community helped the
development of a child’s L1.

Excite (Activity)

1. Differentiate first language to second language.

2. Briefly discuss the illustration:

Explore (Topic Discussion)

Language acquisition is the most impressive
aspect of human development both in
psychological and cognitive perspective.
However, all the normal human beings acquire
the language they first encounter as children.
Then they might learn multiple languages but
those languages will always be different from the
first language they acquired by being exposed
to.
So, it is evident that there are a lot of differences between the first language and
the second language of a person.

MAJOR THEORIES ABOUT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

EARLY THEORISTS
Pavlov (1849-1936)

Ivan P. Pavlov is Russia's most famous scientist. He first won great distinction for his
research on the physiology of the digestive system. Pavlov encountered a
methodological problem that was ultimately to prove more important and more
interesting than his physiological research. He had discovered "conditioning". For
Pavlov, all behavior was reflexive. But how do such behaviors differ from the
behavior commonly called "instinctive" ? Instinctive behavior is sometimes said to be
motivated. The animal has to be hungry, to besexually aroused, or to have nest-
building hormones before these kinds of instinctive behavior can occur. But Pavlov
concluded that there seems to be no basis for distinguishing between reflexes and
what has commonly been thought of as non reflexive behavior. As a psychologist,
Pavlov was concerned with the nervous system, and specifically the cerebral cortex,
not with any lawfulness that he might find in behavior. At a more abstract level,
Pavlov thought that all learning, whether of elicited responses in animals or of highly
conceptual behaviors in humans, wasdue to the mechanisms of classical
conditioning. We now believe it to be wrong,but it is none the less one of the great
ideas of our culture. (Bolles)

Watson ( 1878-1958)

John B. Watson was one of the most colorful personalities in the history of
psychology. Although he did not invent behaviorism, he became widely known as its
chief spokesman and protagonist. Watson was brought up in the prevalent tradition:
Mechanism explains behavior. In a widely used textbook (Watson, 1914) he said that
the study of the mind is the province of philosophy; it is the realm of speculation and
endless word games. The mind has no place in psychology. A science of psychology
must be based on objective phenomena and the ultimate explanation must be found
in the central nervous system.

It was Watson, more than Pavlov or any other one person, who convinced
psychologists that the real explanation of behavior lay in the nervous system and
that as soon as we understood the brain a little better, most of the mysteries would
disappear. And, it was mainly because of Watson that so many psychologists came
to believe that what they called conditioning was so important. (Bolles)

Skinner (1904-1990)

B. F. Skinner is considered by many authorities to have been the greatest behavioral

psychologist of all time. Earlier behaviorism had been concerned with stimulus-
response connections. Skinner looked at the learning process in the opposite way,
investigating how learning was affected by stimuli presented after an act was
performed. He found that certain stimuli caused the organism to repeat an act more
frequently. He called stimuli with this effect the "reinforcers". Watson found that by
providing reinforcement in a systematic way one couldshape the behavior in desired
directions. Link to operant

Teachers have benefited the most from Skinner's fundamental work in reinforcement
as a means of controlling and motivating student behavior. Its various applications to
classroom practice are commonly called "behavior modification", a technique that
many teachers consider to be one of theirmost valuable tools for improving both
learning and behavior of their students.(Charles)

THE BEHAVIORAL APPROACH. Human behavior is learned, thus all behavior can
be unlearned and new behaviors learned in its place. Behaviorism is concerned
primarily with the observable and measurable aspects of human behavior. Therefore
when behaviorsbecome unacceptable, they can be unlearned. Behaviorism views
development as a continuous process in which children play a relatively passive role.
It is alsoa general approach that is used in a variety of settings including both clinical
and educational.

Behaviorists assume that the only things that are real (or at leastworth studying) are
the things we can see and observe. We cannot see the mind ,the id, or the
unconscious, but we can see how people act, react and behave. From behavior we
may be able to make inferences about the minds and the brain,but they are not the
primary focus of the investigation. What people do,not what they think or feel, is the
object of the study. Likewise the behaviorist does not look to the mind or the brain to
understand the causes of abnormal behavior. He assumes that the behavior
represents certain learned habits, and he attempts to determine how they are
learned.

The material that is studied is always behavior. Because behaviorists are not
interested in the mind, or its more rarified equivalents such as psyche and soul,
inferences about the conditions that maintain and reinforce human behavior can be
made from the study of animal behavior. Animal research has provided a very
important foundation for the behavioral approach. The behavioral researcher is
interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying the behavior of both normal
individuals and those with problems that might be referred as "mental illness". When
the behavioral model is applied to mental illness, it tends to be used for a wide
variety of presenting problems. It is perhaps most effective in treating behavioral
disorders and disorders ofimpulse control, such as excessivedrinking, obesity, or
sexual problems. Behavioral approaches may bequite useful in treatment of anxiety
and have occasionally been helpful in the management of more severe mental
disorders such as schizophrenia.

THE NATIVIST APPROACH. The most well-known theory about language

acquisition is the nativist theory, which suggests that we are born with something in
our genes that allows us to learn language. It proposes that there is a theoretical
language acquisition device (LAD) somewhere in our brains that is responsible for
learning a language the same way the hypothalamus is responsible for maintaining
your body temperature. If language was partly biological, it could explain why
humans seem to have far more complicated communication patterns than any other
species.

Although no physical “language organ” exists in the brain, language acquisition can
be hampered if certain parts of the brain are damaged during critical periods of
language development. Damage to the left hemisphere, for example can lead to
aphasia - a disorder which causes problems with language, while leaving intelligence
untouched. For example, in Wernicke’s aphasia, patients with damage in a certain
region of the brain can no longer understand language. Although they can still form
normal sentences, neither what they say nor the words of others make any sense to
them. Patients with Broca’s aphasia on the other hand, have problems forming
language but no trouble understanding what is said to them. Studies have shown
that young children with damage in similar regions of the brain can actually grow up
with only slightly impaired language ability - implying that the brain can develop new
language pathways that are good, but not quite as good as the original (Reilly, 1998).
Nativist theory also suggests that there is a universal grammar that is shared across
differing languages, because this grammar is part of our genetic make-up. The
majority of world languages have verbs and nouns, although this is not true in every
instance, as well as similar ways to structure thoughts. Language is thought of as
having a finite amount of rules from which we can build an infinite amount of
phrases, and the core of these rules is somehow programmed into our brains. This is
an ideal theory for explaining how young children can learn such complicated ideas
so quickly, or why there are so many similarities in language around the world. This
theory is comparable to how we think of numbers; regardless of cultural background,
math always works the same way.

A COGNITIVE THEORY of learning sees second language acquisition as a

conscious and reasoned thinking process, involving the deliberate use of learning
strategies. Learning strategies are special ways of processing information that
enhance comprehension, learning or retention of information. This explanation of
language learning contrasts strongly with the behaviourist account of language
learning, which sees language learning as an unconscious, automatic process.

Example
This view leads to a classroom focus on using learning strategies that have been
observed in successful language learners and to a view of the learner as an
'information-processor', with limitations as to how much new information can be
retained, and who needs strategies to be able to transfer information into memory.

In the classroom
Relevant activities include review and revision, class vocabulary bags, using a
scaffolding approach with young learners, analysis and discussion of language and
topics, inductive approaches and learner training.

THE FUNCTIONAL APPROACH is considered to be the second paradigm of

psychology. This approach focuses on the function of the mental processes involving
consciousness. 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. He also noted that it was a psychologist's job to
understand these functions so they can discover how the mental processes operate.
This idea was an alternative approach to Structuralism, which was the first paradigm
in psychology. (Gordon, 1995).

In second language acquisition (SLA) functional approaches are share similarities

with Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG). Focus is on the use of language in real
situations (performance), as well as underlying knowledge (competence).

THE LEARNING THEORY is another way to look at language learning as to treat it

like learning a new skill in language acquisition which suggests that children learn a
language much like they learn to tie their shoes or how to count; through repetition
and reinforcement. When babies first learn to babble, parents and guardians smile,
coo, and hug them for this behavior. As they grow older, children are praised for
speaking properly and corrected when they misspeak. Thus, language arises from
stimuli and stimuli response. While this is logical, it fails to explain how new words or
phrases come about, since children are only parroting the things they have heard
from others.

THE INTERACTIONIST APPROACH (sociocultural theory) combines ideas from

sociology and biology to explain how language is developed. According to this
theory, children learn language out of a desire to communicate with the world around
them. Language emerges from, and is dependent upon, social interaction. The
Interactionist approach claims that if our language ability develops out of a desire to
communicate, then language is dependent upon whom we want to communicate
with. This means the environment you grow up in will heavily affect how well and
how quickly you learn to talk. For example, infants being raised by only their mother
are more likely to learn the word “mama”, and less likely to develop “dada”. Among
the first words we learn are ways to demand attention or food. If you’ve ever tried to
learn a new language, you may recognize this theory’s influence. Language classes
often teach commonly used vocabulary and phrases first, and then focus on building
conversations rather than simple rote memorization. Even when we expand our
vocabularies in our native language, we remember the words we use the most.

It’s important to keep in mind that theories of language acquisition are just ideas
created by researchers to explain their observations. How accurate these theories
are to the real world is debatable. Language acquisition is a complicated process
influenced by the genetics of an individual as well as the environment they live in.

How do scientists today study language learning?

Many of these theories initially came about as a result of what is called “armchair
psychology”; that is, sitting and thinking about a problem. It is extremely difficult to
collect objective and accurate data on what’s going on in the brain in terms of its
direct relationship to a behavior such as language. That said, some computational
models of language acquisition have been gaining traction in the past several
decades. A computational model is a mathematical way to recreate complicated
systems we see everyday; from how water flows in a river, to how children learn
languages. The model is built to represent the way we think something happens. For
example, in the model of the learning theory approach, a word would be learned
faster if it came up a lot or the subject received a lot of input about it. Then, linguists
change how different variables work to see what affect that would have on the
system. If the model behaves and “learns” the same way that we do, it’s a good sign
that the model is on the right track. These models have helped to identify and
measure linguistical features such as the critical period for language learning, the
vocabulary burst, and the U-shaped learning mentioned earlier.

New brain imaging technology, such as MRIs and fMRIs have also allowed scientists
to look at the brains of children and patients with language-acquisition disorders to
understand this complicated event. An fMRI can track where and when our brains
use energy. If a certain part of your brain lights up while you’re learning a language,
that part of your brain is using energy, and in this context might be related to
language- acquisition. Of course we learn over time and not all at once, so there is a
limit to what we can learn via imaging which represents the brain in a single moment.
While we still have ways to go before we completely understand how we learn a
language, we definitely know enough to know that it’s a pretty incredible feat. So give
yourself a well-deserved pat on the back and just remember that the phrase “it’s so
easy, a child could do it!” doesn’t always apply.

TYPES OF LEARNING

Classical conditioning is demonstrated when a neutral stimulus acquires the

eliciting properties of the unconditioned stimulus through pairing the unconditioned
stimulus with a neutral stimulus. Behavior is controlled by association.

Operant conditioning is demonstrated when the reinforcing consequences

immediately following the response increases its future likelihood; aversive
consequences immediately following the response to decrease its future likelihood.

In looking for a more direct and effective explanation of the development of children's
social behavior, psychologists sparked the emergenceof observational learning (or
Social Learning Theory). Albert Bandura demonstrated that modeling or
observational learning is the basis for avariety of children's behaviors. He stated that
children acquire many favorable and unfavorable responses by simply watching and
listening to others around them. A child who kicks other children after he sees it
occurs at the babysitter's house, a student who shaves her hair because her friends
did, andthe boy who is always late for class because others are, are all displaying
the results of observational learning.

Other examples of observational learning include: modeling, imitation, vicarious

learning, identification, copying, social facilitation, contagion, androle play. In
studying animal behaviors, the term imprinting was introduced by Lorenz. Imprinting
refers to the appearance of complex behaviors apparently as a result of exposure to
an appropriate object at a critical time. This is demonstrated with newly hatched
ducklings which will follow the first moving object they encounter and become
attached to it (usually a mother).

Assessment Techniques:

A behaviorally oriented clinician has an interest in the response pattern itself and the
particular situations in which it occurs. He ultilizes techniques that enable the
determination of the functional relationship between the maladaptive behavior and
the environmental stimuli that are affecting it. The clinician attempts to collect
information that will enable him/her todetemine:

 What behavior requires modification?

 What environmental factors are maintaining those behaviors?
 What positive reinforcement or punishing events can be used to alterindividual
behavior?

Applications
Commonly used applications by a behaviorist include: positive reinforcement,
negative reinforcement, punishment, token economy, self management, extinction,
shaping, contracts,time out, and systematic desensitization.
 Experience (Formative Assessment)

1. Make a table of the various theories and differentiate one from the other.

2. Which among the different types of theories are commonly manifested among
children? Why?

3. Refer to this video: https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-

environment/language/v/theories-of-language-development; What do you think is
the difference of the three theories that was not discussed in this video?
 Lesson 3: STAGES IN CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Lesson Outcomes (Objectives)

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. cite scenarios on how parents, teachers, and the community helped the
development of a child’s L1
2. present different cases and scenarios on the development of child’s first
language.
3. acquire knowledge on language acquisition due to nurture and nature.
Excite (Activity)

1. Watch this video clip and write main things that affects language learning? https://

2. What stages of language acquisition do you remember that you’ve experienced?

3. What are other reasons some people speak much and others slow in speech?

Explore (Topic Discussion)

STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN CHILDREN

In nearly all cases, children's language development follows a predictable sequence.

However, there is a great deal of variation in the age at which children reach a given
milestone. Furthermore, each child's development is usually characterized by
gradual acquisition of particular abilities: thus "correct" use of English verbal
inflection will emerge over a period of a year or more, starting from a stage where
vebal inflections are always left out, and ending in a stage where they are nearly
always used correctly.

There are also many different ways to characterize the developmental sequence. On
the production side, one way to name the stages is as follows, focusing primarily on
the unfolding of lexical and syntactic knowledge:
VOCALIZATIONS IN THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE

At birth, the infant vocal tract is in some ways more like

that of an ape than that of an adult human. Compare
the diagram of the infant vocal tract shown on the left to
diagrams of adult human and ape.

In particular, the tip of the velum reaches or overlaps

with the tip of the epiglottis. As the infant grows, the
tract gradually reshapes itself in the adult pattern.

During the first two months of life, infant vocalizations are mainly expressions of
discomfort (crying and fussing), along with sounds produced as a by-product of
reflexive or vegetative actions such as coughing, sucking, swallowing and burping.
There are some nonreflexive, nondistress sounds produced with a lowered velum
and a closed or nearly closed mouth, giving the impression of a syllabic nasal or a
nasalized vowel.

During the period from about 2-4 months, infants begin making "comfort sounds",
typically in response to pleasurable interaction with a caregiver. The earliest comfort
sounds may be grunts or sighs, with later versions being more vowel-like "coos". The
vocal tract is held in a fixed position. Initially comfort sounds are brief and produced
in isolation, but later appear in series separated by glottal stops. Laughter appears
around 4 months.

During the period from 4-7 months, infants typically engage in "vocal play",
manipulating pitch (to produce "squeals" and "growls"), loudness (producing "yells"),
and also manipulating tract closures to produce friction noises, nasal murmurs,
"raspberries" and "snorts".

At about seven months, "canonical babbling" appears: infants start to make extended
sounds that are chopped up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-like
sequences, opening and closing their jaws, lips and tongue. The range of sounds
produced are heard as stop-like and glide-like. Fricatives, affricates and liquids are
more rarely heard, and clusters are even rarer. Vowels tend to be low and open, at
least in the beginning.
Repeated sequences are often produced, such as [bababa] or [nanana], as well as
"variegated" sequences in which the characteristics of the consonant-like
articulations are varied. The variegated sequences are initially rare and become
more common later on. Both vocal play and babbling are produced more often in
interactions with caregivers, but infants will also produce them when they are alone.

No other animal does anything like babbling. It has often been hypothesized that
vocal play and babbling have the function of "practicing" speech-like gestures,
helping the infant to gain control of the motor systems involved, and to learn the
acoustical consequences of different gestures.

ONE WORD (HOLOPHRASTIC) STAGE

At about ten months, infants start to utter recognizable words. Some word-like
vocalizations that do not correlate well with words in the local language may
consistently be used by particular infants to express particular emotional states: one
infant is reported to have used to express pleasure, and another is said to have
used to express "distress or discomfort". For the most part, recognizable
words are used in a context that seems to involve naming: "duck" while the child hits
a toy duck off the edge of the bath; "sweep" while the child sweeps with a broom;
"car" while the child looks out of the living room window at cars moving on the street
below; "papa" when the child hears the doorbell.

Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or too broad: "bottle"
used only for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for a particular bear; "dog" used for
lambs, cats, and cows as well as dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping
as well as for kicking. These underextensions and overextensions develop and
change over time in an individual child's usage.

Perception vs. production

Clever experiments have shown that most infants can give evidence (for instance, by
gaze direction) of understanding some words at the age of 4-9 months, often even
before babbling begins. In fact, the development of phonological abilities begins even
earlier. Newborns can distinguish speech from non-speech, and can also distinguish
among speech sounds (e.g. [t] vs. [d] or [t] vs. [k]); within a couple of months of birth,
infants can distinguish speech in their native language from speech in other
languages.

Early linguistic interaction with mothers, fathers and other caregivers is almost
certainly important in establishing and consolidating these early abilities, long before
the child is giving any indication of language abilities.

Rate of vocabulary development

In the beginning, infants add active vocabulary somewhat gradually. Here are
measures of active vocabulary development in two studies. The Nelson study was
based on diaries kept by mothers of all of their children's utterances, while the
Fenson study is based on asking mothers to check words on a list to indicate which
they think their child produces.
There is often a spurt of vocabulary acquisition during the second year. Early words
are acquired at a rate of 1-3 per week (as measured by production diaries); in many
cases the rate may suddenly increase to 8-10 new words per week, after 40 or so
words have been learned. However, some children show a steadier rate of
acquisition during these early stages. The rate of vocabulary acquisition definitely
does accelerate in the third year and beyond: a plausible estimate would be an
average of 10 words a day during pre-school and elementary school years.

Sex differences in vocabulary acquisition

Against a background of enormous individual variation, girl babies tend to learn more
words faster than boy babies do; but the difference disappears over time. As time
passes, the difference disappears entirely, and then emerges again in the opposite
direction, with males showing larger average vocabularies during college years
(though again against the background of within-group variation that's much larger
than the across-group differences).

Perception vs. production again

Benedict (1979) asked mothers to keep a diary indicating not only what words
children produced, but what words they gave evidence of understanding. Her results
indicate that at the time when children were producing 10 words, they were
estimated to understand 60 words; and there was an average gap of five months
between the time when a child understood 50 words and the time when (s)he
produced 50 words.

All of these methods (maternal diaries and checklists) probably tend to

underestimate the number of words about young children actually know something,
although they also may overestimate the number of words to which they attribute
adult-like meanings.

Combining words: the emergence of syntax

During the second year, word combinations begin to appear. Novel combinations
(where we can be sure that the result is not being treated as a single word) appear
sporadically as early as 14 months. At 18 months, 11% of parents say that their child
is often combining words, and 46% say that (s)he is sometimes combining words. By
25 months, almost all children are sometimes combining words, but about 20% are
still not doing so "often."
Early multi-unit utterances

In some cases, early multiple-unit utterances can be seen as concatenations of

individual naming actions that might just as well have occurred alone: "mommy" and
"hat" might be combined as "mommy hat"; "shirt" and "wet" might be combined as
"shirt wet". However, these combinations tend to occur in an order that is appropriate
for the language being learned:

Doggy bark
Ken water (for "Ken is drinking water")
Hit doggy

Some combinations with certain closed-class morphemes begin to occur as well: "my
turn", "in there", etc. However, these are the closed-class words such as pronouns
and prepositions that have semantic content in their own right that is not too different
from that of open-class words. The more purely grammatical morphemes -- verbal
inflections and verbal auxiliaries, nominal determiners, complementizes etc. -- are
typically absent.

Since the earliest multi-unit utterances are almost always two morphemes long -- two
being the first number after one! -- this period is sometimes called the "two-word
stage". Quite soon, however, children begin sometimes producing utterances with
more than two elements, and it is not clear that the period in which most utterances
have either one or two lexical elements should really be treated as a separate stage.
In the early multi-word stage, children who are asked to repeat sentences may
simply leave out the determiners, modals and verbal auxiliaries, verbal inflections,
etc., and often pronouns as well. The same pattern can be seen in their own
spontaneous utterances:

1. "I can see a cow" repeated as "See cow" (Eve at 25 months)

2. "The doggy will bite" repeated as "Doggy bite" (Adam at 28 months)
3. Kathryn no like celery (Kathryn at 22 months)
4. Baby doll ride truck (Allison at 22 months)
5. Pig say oink (Claire at 25 months)
6. Want lady get chocolate (Daniel at 23 months)
7. "Where does Daddy go?" repeated as "Daddy go?" (Daniel at 23 months)
8. "Car going?" to mean "Where is the car going?" (Jem at 21 months)

The pattern of leaving out most grammatical/functional morphemes is called

"telegraphic", and so people also sometimes refer to the early multi-word stage as
the "telegraphic stage".

Acquisition of grammatical elements and the corresponding structures

At about the age of two, children first begin to use grammatical elements. In English,
this includes finite auxiliaries ("is", "was"), verbal tense and agreement affixes ("-ed"
and '-s'), nominative pronouns ("I", "she"), complementizes ("that", "where"), and
determiners ("the", "a"). The process is usually a somewhat gradual one, in which
the more telegraphic patterns alternate with adult or adult-like forms, sometimes in
adjacent utterances:
 1. She's gone. Her gone school. (Domenico at 24 months)
2. He's kicking a beach ball. Her climbing up the ladder there. (Jem at 24 months).
3. I teasing Mummy. I'm teasing Mummy. (Holly at 24 months)
4. I having this. I'm having 'nana. (Olivia at 27 months).
5. I'm having this little one. Me'll have that. (Betty at 30 months).
6. Mummy haven't finished yet, has she? (Olivia at 36 months).

Over a year to a year and a half, sentences get longer, grammatical elements are
less often omitted and less often inserted incorrectly, and multiple-clause sentences
become commoner.

Perception vs. production again

Several studies have shown that children who regularly omit grammatical elements
in their speech, nevertheless expect these elements in what they hear from adults, in
the sense that their sentence comprehension suffers if the grammatical elements are
missing or absent.

Progress backwards

Often morphological inflections include a regular case ("walk/walked",

"open/opened") and some irregular or exceptional cases ("go/went", "throw/threw",
"hold/held"). In the beginning, such words will be used in their root form. As
inflections first start being added, both regular and irregular patterns are found. At a
certain point, it is common for children to over-generalize the regular case, producing
forms like "bringed", "goed"; "foots", "mouses", etc. At this stage, the child's speech
may actually become less correct by adult standards than it was earlier, because of
over-regularization.

This over-regularization, like most other aspects of children's developing grammar, is

typically resistant to correction:

CHILD: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

ADULT: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
CHILD: Yes.
ADULT: What did you say she did?
CHILD: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
ADULT: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: No, she holded them loosely.

THE FIVE STAGES OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Anyone who has been around children who are learning to talk knows that the
process happens in stages—first understanding, then one-word utterances, then
two-word phrases, and so on. Students learning a second language move through
five predictable stages: Preproduction, Early Production, Speech Emergence,
Intermediate Fluency, and Advanced Fluency (Krashen & Terrell, 1983). How quickly
students’ progress through the stages depends on many factors, including level of
formal education, family background, and length of time spent in the country.
It is important that you tie instruction for each student to his or her particular stage of
language acquisition. Knowing this information about each student allows you to
work within his or her zone of proximal development—that gap between what
students can do on their own and what they can do with the help of more
knowledgeable individuals (Vygotsky, 1978).

Another reason for all teachers to gain insights into their students' stages of second
language acquisition is to meet the requirements of the 2001 No Child Left Behind
Act, which requires ELLs to progress in their content knowledge and in their English
language proficiency. How are we going to accomplish this if we are not all
responsible for content and language?

Although there may be an approximate time frame for each stage of language
acquisition, the length of time students spend at each level will be as varied as the
students themselves.

From Figure 2.1, it is OK to ask Preproduction students "Where is …?" or "Who has
…?" questions—that is, questions that require a pointing, drawing, or circling
response. It is even OK to ask Preproduction students a question every so often that
requires a one-word response, because we always want to transition them to the
next stage. For Early Production students, questions that require a one-word
response,
such as yes/no and either/or questions, are acceptable. You also want to begin
asking students at this stage questions that require a phrase or short sentence. R
Speech Emergence students should be asked to answer questions that require a
short- sentence response. It is OK to sometimes ask these students questions
requiring a multiple-sentence response, but it is not OK to ask them questions
requiring a pointing or one-word response.

How about Intermediate and Advanced Fluency students? It is OK to ask them

questions that require a lot of verbal output, but it is not OK to ask those questions
requiring minimal verbal output. You can use tiered questions to include all ELLs in
whole-class activities, or one on one to check comprehension or content learning. To
accomplish this, you will need to know each student's stage of language acquisition.

Classroom Example
To improve her ability to ask tiered questions, a 1st grade teacher asks the school
ESL teacher to demonstrate the strategy in her class during a discussion of The
Three Little Pigs. For each stage of second language acquisition, the ESL teacher
asks the following types of tiered questions:

 Preproduction: Ask questions that students can answer by pointing at pictures in

the book ("Show me the wolf," "Where is the house?").
 Early Production: Ask questions that students can answer with one or two
words ("Did the brick house fall down?" "Who blew down the straw house?").
 Speech Emergence: Ask "why" and "how" questions that students can answer
with short sentences ("Explain why the third pig built his house out of bricks."
"What does the wolf want?").
 Intermediate Fluency: Ask "What would happen if …" and "Why do you think …"
questions ("What would happen if the pigs outsmarted the wolf?" "Why could the
wolf blow down the house made of sticks, but not the house made of bricks?").
 Advanced Fluency: Ask students to retell the story, including main plot elements
but leaving out unnecessary details.

Experience (Formative Assessment)

1. Cite real life scenarios where language development as seen in child stages.

2. Which stage are sometimes skipped or not common to children?

3. Browse in the internet and find 3 different / unique cases of language acquisition.
Lesson 4 SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Lesson Outcomes (Objectives)

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. compare and contrast each school of thought of language acquisition.

2. examine the teaching implications relevant to each school of thought.
3. point out classroom practices that manifest each school of thought.

Excite (Activity)

1. Go to this site observe the differences of the concepts in language acquisition:

https://www.slideshare.net/carlachavezs/schools-of-thought-in-second-language-
learning-46911906

2. What is the meaning of the left table?

Why do they change with the course of time?

Explore (Topic Discussion)

LANGUAGE TEACHING APPROACHES REVIEW

In learning languages, a distinction is usually made between mother tongues,
second languages, and foreign languages. A mother tongue is the first language or
languages one learns (or acquires) as a child. When immigrants come to a new
country and learn the language of that country, they are learning a second language.
On the other hand, when English-speaking students in the United States learn
French or Spanish in school, or when Brazilians study English in Brazil, they are
learning a foreign language. The acronyms ESL and EFL stand for the learning of
English as a Second and as a Foreign Language.

Many theories about the learning and teaching of languages have been proposed.
These theories, normally influenced by developments in the fields of linguistics and
psychology, have inspired many approaches to the teaching of second and foreign
languages. The study of these theories and how they influence language teaching
methodology today is called applied linguistics.

The grammar-translation method (18th, 19th and early 20th century), for example,
is an early method based on the assumptions that language is primarily graphic, that
the main purpose of second language study is to build knowledge of the structure of
the
language either as a tool for literary research and translation or for the development
of the learner's logical powers, and that the process of second language learning
must be deductive, requires effort, and must be carried out with constant reference to
the learner's native language.

The audiolingual approach, which was very popular from the 1940s through the
1960s, is based in structural linguistics (structuralism) & behavioristic psychology
(Skinner's behaviorism), and places heavy emphasis on spoken rather than written
language, and on the grammar of particular languages, stressing habit formation as
a mode of learning. Rote memorization, role playing and structure drilling are the
predominant activities. Audiolingual approaches do not depend so much on the
instructor's creative ability and do not require excellent proficiency in the language,
being always railed to sets of lessons and books. Therefore, they are easy to be
implemented, cheap to be maintained and are still in use by many packaged
language courses (especially in Brazil).

By the middle of the 20th century cognitive psychologists

like Vygotsky and Piaget bring up theories that help to explain the limited
effectiveness of the traditional prescriptive and mechanistic approaches to language
teaching. These theories serve as a basis for the new natural-communicative
approaches.

Beginning in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky and his followers challenged previous
assumptions about language structure and language learning, taking the position
that language is creative (not memorized), and rule governed (not based on habit),
and that universal phenomena of the human mind underlie all language. This
"Chomskian revolution" initially gave rise to eclecticism in teaching, but it has more
recently led to two main branches of teaching approaches: the humanistic
approaches based on the charismatic teaching of one person, and content-based
communicative approaches, which try to incorporate what has been learned in recent
years about the need for active learner participation, about appropriate language
input, and about communication as a human activity. Most recently, there has been
also a significant shift toward greater attention to reading and writing as a
complement of listening and speaking, based on a new awareness of significant
differences between spoken and written languages, and on the notion that dealing
with language involves an interaction between the text on the one hand, and the
culturally-based world knowledge and experientially-based learning of the receiver
on the other.

There have been developments such as a great emphasis on

individualized instruction, more humanistic approaches to
language learning, a greater focus on the learner, and greater
emphasis on development of communicative, as opposed to
merely linguistic, competence. In addition to Chomsky's
generativism, the advances in cognitive science and
educational psychology made by Jean Piaget and Lev
Semenovich Vygotsky in the first half of the century strongly
influenced language teaching theory in the 1960s and 70s.
These new trends favoring more humanistic views and putting a greater focus on the
learner and on social interaction gave way to the Natural (USA)
and Communicative (England) approaches. Psychologist Charles Curran's
Community Language Learning and Krashen's and Terrell's Natural Approach (in the
1980s) are good examples of this latest trend in language teaching that Hammerly
calls Communicative Acquisitionist Naturalistic mega theory of language
instruction.

GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use

of the concept of a generative grammar. The term 'generative' is a concept borrowed
from mathematics, indicating a set of definitions rather than a system that creates
something. It is most closely associated with the work of Noam Chomsky, beginning
with what is collectively known as the Standard Theory that set out what a model of
grammar should be able to describe.

Definition of 'generative'

In the 'Standard Theory', a generative grammar is formally defined as one that is fully
explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate exactly those
sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a
given language, and no others. This is the definition that is offered by Chomsky, who
popularized the term, and by most dictionaries of linguistics. The term 'generate' is
not used in the popular sense of 'create'; rather, it means that the grammar "assigns
a structural description" to the sentence.

Structure-dependence

The grammar is structure-dependent in that the rules must refer to the structure of
the language in order to adequately perform some operation. A structure-
independent grammar has been ruled out as a possible characterization of natural
language through examples such as (1), (2) and (3):

(1) Fred has seen Bill. Has Fred seen Bill?

(2) The man who was sleeping is here. *Was the man who sleeping is here?
Although it appears that English question formation is merely a matter of moving the
first verb one finds from the left of the sentence to the beginning, examples such as
(2) disprove the notion. The rule exemplified in (1) is structure-independent, in that its
description must refer to the sentence structure: move the initial auxiliary verb of the
main clause ahead of the subject noun phrase.

OTHER USES OF 'GENERATIVE'

Generative semantics
The 1970s saw a movement away from syntax as central to generative linguistics;
instead, linguists such as George Lakoff argued that semantics was the essential
'core ' of language, from which the syntax was immediately derived, with no
intermediate levels. This contrasted sharply with Chomsky's model, which integrated
the two in Deep Structure formulations.

General linguistics
Controversially, 'generative' is used to define the approach to linguistics taken by
Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterized by the use of
transformational grammar - a theory that has changed greatly since it was first
promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures - and by the
assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of
fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term
'generative linguistics' is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's
transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the
"Deep Structure" and "Surface Structure" of sentences.

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics, which in the early 1960s was developing rapidly as part of the
general movement towards cognitive psychology, found this anti-behaviorist
emphasis congenial, and rapidly absorbed many Chomskian ideas including the
notion of generative grammar. However, as both cognitive psychology and
psycholinguistics have matured, they have found less and less use for generative
linguistics, not least because Chomsky has repeatedly emphasized that he never
intended to specify the mental processes by which people actually generate
sentences, or parse sentences that they hear or read.

Cognitive linguistics

Cognitive linguistics emerged in the latter years of the twentieth century as an

alternative linguistic paradigm to generative linguistics. Cognitive linguistics seeks to
unify the understanding of language with the understanding of how specific neural
structures function biologically. This is more a difference in practical research
strategy than in philosophy: in principle, neurological evidence has always been
considered relevant by generative linguists, but in practice it has usually been
regarded as too inconclusive and open to interpretation to be of much use. However,
some researchers within generative linguistics (e.g. Alec Marantz) publish in
neurolinguistics.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY is the scientific study of mental processes such as

"attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and
thinking".

The origin of cognitive psychology occurred in the 1960s in a break from

behaviorism, which had held from the 1920s to 1950s that unobservable mental
processes were outside of the realm of empirical science. This break came as
researchers in linguistics and cybernetics as well as applied psychology used
models of mental processing to explain human behavior. Such research became
possible due to the advances in technology that allowed for the measurement of
brain activity.

Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into other
branches of psychology and various other modern disciplines such as cognitive
science, linguistics, and economics. The domain of cognitive psychology overlaps
with that of cognitive science, which takes a more interdisciplinary approach and
includes studies of non-human subjects and artificial intelligence.

Cognitive Processes/ Control

The main focus of cognitive psychologists is on the mental processes that affect
behavior. Those processes include, but are not limited to, the following three stages
of memory:
1. sensory memory storage: holds sensory information
2. short term memory storage: holds information temporarily for analysis and
retrieves information from the Long term memory.
3. Long term memory: holds information over an extended period of time which
receives information from the short term memory.

Attention

The psychological definition of attention is "a state of focused awareness on a subset

of the available perceptual information". A key function of attention is to identify
irrelevant data and filter it out, enabling significant data to be distributed to the other
mental processes. For example, the human brain may simultaneously receive
auditory, visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile information. The brain is able to
consciously handle only a small subset of this information, and this is accomplished
through the attentional processes.

Attention can be divided into two major attentional systems: exogenous control and
endogenous control. Exogenous control works in a bottom-up manner and is
responsible for orienting reflex, and pop-out effects. Endogenous control works top-
down and is the more deliberate attentional system, responsible for divided attention
and conscious processing.

One major focal point relating to attention within the field of cognitive psychology is
the concept of divided attention. A number of early studies dealt with the ability of a
person wearing headphones to discern meaningful conversation when presented
with different messages into each ear; this is known as the dichotic listening task.
Key findings involved an increased understanding of the mind's ability to both focus
on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information being taken in
from the ear not being consciously attended to. E.g., participants (wearing
earphones) may be told that they will be hearing separate messages in each ear and
that they are expected to attend only to information related to basketball. When the
experiment starts, the message about basketball will be presented to the left ear and
non-relevant information will be presented to the right ear. At some point the
message related to basketball will switch to the right ear and the non-relevant
information to the left ear. When this happens, the listener is usually able to repeat
the entire message at the end, having attended to the left or right ear only when it
was appropriate. The ability to attend to one conversation in the face of many is
known as the cocktail party effect.

Other major findings include that participants can't comprehend both passages when
shadowing one passage, they can't report the content of the unattended message,
they can shadow a message better if the pitches in each ear are different. However,
while deep processing doesn't occur, early sensory processing does. Subjects did
notice if the pitch of the unattended message changed or if it ceased altogether, and
some even oriented to the unattended message if their name was mentioned.

Memory

The two main types of memory are short-term memory and long-term memory;
however, short-term memory has become better understood to be working memory.
Cognitive psychologists often study memory in terms of working memory.
Working memory
Though working memory is often thought of as just short-term memory, it is more
clearly defined as the ability to process and maintain temporary information in a wide
range of everyday activities in the face of distraction. The famously known capacity
of memory of 7 plus or minus 2 is a combination of both memories in working
memory and long term memory.

One of the classic experiments is by Ebbinghaus, who found the serial position effect
where information from the beginning and end of the list of random words were
better recalled than those in the center. This primacy and recency effect varies in
intensity based on list length. Its typical U-shaped curve can be disrupted by an
attention- grabbing word; this is known as the Von Restorff effect.

The Baddeley & Hitch Model of Working Memory

Many models of working memory have been made. One of the most regarded is the
Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory. It takes into account both visual and
auditory stimuli, long-term memory to use as a reference, and a central processor to
combine and understand it all.

A large part of memory is forgetting,

and there is a large debate among
psychologists of decay theory versus
interference theory.

Long-term memory

Modern conceptions of memory are

usually about long-term memory and
break it down into three main sub-
classes. These three classes are
somewhat hierarchical in nature, in terms of the level of conscious thought related to
their use.

 Procedural memory is memory for the performance of particular types of action.

It is often activated on a subconscious level, or at most requires a minimal
amount of conscious effort. Procedural memory includes stimulus-response-type
information, which is activated through association with particular tasks, routines,
etc. A person is using procedural knowledge when they seemingly "automatically"
respond in a particular manner to a particular situation or process. An example is
driving a car.

 Semantic memory is the encyclopedic knowledge that a person possesses.

Knowledge like what the Eiffel Tower looks like, or the name of a friend from sixth
grade, represent semantic memory. Access of semantic memory ranges from
slightly to extremely effortful, depending on a number of variables including but
not limited to recency of encoding of the information, number of associations it
has to other information, frequency of access, and levels of meaning (how deeply
it was processed when it was encoded).
 Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly
stated. It contains all memories that are temporal in nature, such as when one
last brushed one's teeth or where one was when one heard about a major news
event. Episodic memory typically requires the deepest level of conscious thought,
as it often pulls together semantic memory and temporal information to formulate
the entire memory.

Perception

Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, and
proprioception) as well as the cognitive processes involved in interpreting those
senses. Essentially, it is how people come to understand the world around them
through the interpretation of stimuli. Early psychologists like Edward B. Titchener
began to work with perception in their structuralist approach to psychology.
Structuralism dealt heavily with trying to reduce human thought (or "consciousness,"
as Titchener would have called it) into its most basic elements by gaining an
understanding of how an individual perceives particular stimuli.

Current perspectives on perception within cognitive psychology tend to focus on

particular ways in which the human mind interprets stimuli from the senses and how
these interpretations affect behavior. An example of the way in which modern
psychologists approach the study of perception is the research being done at the
Center for Ecological Study of Perception and Action at the University Of Connecticut
(CESPA). One study at CESPA concerns ways in which individuals perceive their
physical environment and how that influences their navigation through that
environment.

Language

Psychologists have had an interest in the cognitive

processes involved with language that dates back to
the 1870s, when Carl Wernicke proposed a model for
the mental processing of language. Current work on
language within the field of cognitive psychology varies
widely. Cognitive psychologists may study language
acquisition, individual components of language formation (like phonemes, how
language use is involved in mood, or numerous other related areas. Significant work
has been done recently with regard to understanding the timing of language
acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of,
developing a learning disability. A study from 2012, showed that while this can be an
effective strategy, it is important that those making evaluations include all relevant
information when making their assessments. Factors such as individual variability,
socioeconomic status, short-term and long-term memory capacity, and others must
be included in order to make valid assessments.

Metacognition

Metacognition, in a broad sense, is the thoughts that a person has about their own
thoughts. More specifically, metacognition includes things like:
 How effective a person is at monitoring their own performance on a given task
(self- regulation).
 A person's understanding of their capabilities on particular mental tasks.
 The ability to apply cognitive strategies.
Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive
psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Being able to
increase a student's metacognitive abilities has been shown to have a significant
impact on their learning and study habits. One key aspect of this concept is the
improvement of students' ability to set goals and self-regulate effectively to meet
those goals. As a part of this process, it is also important to ensure that students are
realistically evaluating their personal degree of knowledge and setting realistic goals
(another metacognitive task.)

Common phenomena related to metacognition include:

 Déjà Vu: feeling of a repeated experience

 Cryptomnesia: generating thought believing it is unique but it is actually a
memory of a past experience, aka unconscious plagiarism.
 False Fame Effect: non-famous names can be made to be famous
 Validity effect: statements seem more valid upon repeated exposure
 Imagination inflation: imagining an event that did not occur and having
increased confidence that it did occur
Experience (Formative Assessment)

Answer or describe the following:

1. Create a summary table of the school of thoughts with its proponent and content.

2. Write down teaching implications relevant to each school of thought.

3. Write down classroom practices that manifest each school of thought.

Lesson 5 CONSTRUCTIVISM: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Lesson Outcomes (Objectives)

At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. discuss constructivism and its multidisciplinary approach.

2. examine the teaching implications relevant to constructivism.
3. point out classroom practices that manifest the school of thought.

Excite (Activity)

Answer the following:

1. Explain the illustration.

2. Watch the given video and give your conclusion about constructivism.
https://slideplayer.com/slide/7405942/
.

Explore (Topic Discussion)

WHAT IS CONSTRUCTIVISM?

Constructivism is basically a theory -- based on observation and scientific study -

- about how people learn. It says that people construct their own understanding and
knowledge of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting on those
experiences. When we encounter something new, we have to reconcile it with our
previous ideas and experience, maybe changing what we believe, or maybe
discarding the new information as irrelevant. In any case, we are active creators of
our own knowledge. To do this, we must ask questions, explore, and assess what
we know.

Constructivism learning theory claims that learning is an active process in which

learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and past
knowledge. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses,
and makes decisions. Constructivism learning theory is one of the most popular
contemporary learning theories in the West. It provides educators with an entirely
new psychological view of examining pedagogical issues.
With the introduction to the constructivism learning theory, which is highly evaluated
and issues its challenge to the traditional theories of teaching and learning, the
present paper focuses on the explanation of the relationship between the
constructivism and the foreign language learning, discussing how to construct the
constructivism belief that the foreign language learning process should be optimized
efficiently and put it into practice, aiming at promoting learners’ foreign language
ability in all-round way.

In the classroom, the constructivist view of learning can point towards a number of
different teaching practices. In the most general sense, it usually means encouraging
students to use active techniques (experiments, real-world problem solving) to create
more knowledge and then to reflect on and talk about what they are doing and how
their understanding is changing. The teacher makes sure she understands the
students' preexisting conceptions, and guides the activity to address them and then
build on them.

Constructivist teachers encourage students to constantly assess how the activity is

helping them gain understanding. By questioning themselves and their strategies,
students in the constructivist classroom ideally become "expert learners." This gives
them ever-broadening tools to keep learning. With a well-planned classroom
environment, the students learn HOW TO LEARN.

You might look at it as a spiral. When they continuously reflect on their experiences,
students find their ideas gaining in complexity and power, and they develop
increasingly strong abilities to integrate new information. One of the teacher's main
roles becomes to encourage this learning and reflection process.

For example: Groups of students in a science class are discussing a problem in

physics. Though the teacher knows the "answer" to the problem, she focuses on
helping students restate their questions in useful ways. She prompts each student to
reflect on and examine his or her current knowledge. When one of the students
comes up with the relevant concept, the teacher seizes upon it, and indicates to the
group that this might be a fruitful avenue for them to explore. They design and
perform relevant experiments. Afterward, the students and teacher talk about what
they have learned, and how their observations and experiments helped (or did not
help) them to better understand the concept.

Contrary to criticisms by some (conservative/traditional) educators, constructivism

does not dismiss the active role of the teacher or the value of expert knowledge.
Constructivism modifies that role, so that teachers help students to construct
knowledge rather than to reproduce a series of facts. The constructivist teacher
provides tools such as problem-solving and inquiry-based learning activities with
which students formulate and test their ideas, draw conclusions and inferences, and
pool and convey their knowledge in a collaborative learning environment.
Constructivism transforms the student from a passive recipient of information to an
active participant in the learning process. Always guided by the teacher, students
construct their knowledge actively rather than just mechanically ingesting knowledge
from the teacher or the textbook.
Constructivism is also often misconstrued as a learning theory that compels students
to "reinvent the wheel." In fact, constructivism taps into and triggers the student's
innate curiosity about the world and how things work. Students do not reinvent the
wheel but, rather, attempt to understand how it turns, how it functions. They become
engaged by applying their existing knowledge and real-world experience, learning to
hypothesize, testing their theories, and ultimately drawing conclusions from their
findings.

Founder of Constructivism: Jean Piaget

History

• Early educational philosophies did not place much value on what would become
constructivist ideas; children's play and exploration was seen as aimless and of
little importance.
• Jean Piaget did not agree with these traditional views, however. He saw play as
an important and necessary part of the student's cognitive development and
provided scientific evidence for his views.
• Today, constructivist theories are influential throughout the formal and informal
learning sectors

Influential Constructivist

• John Dewey (1859–1952)

• Maria Montessori (1870–1952)
• Jean Piaget (1896–1980)
• Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)
• Heinz von Foerster (1911–2002)
• George Kelly (1905–1967)
• Jerome Bruner (1915–)

Theory of constructivism

Formalization of the theory of constructivism is generally attributed to Jean Piaget,

who articulated mechanisms by which knowledge is internalized by learners. He
suggested that through process of accommodation and assimilation individuals
construct new knowledge from their experiences.

Assimilation and Accommodation

• Assimilation occurs when a learner adds new information, basically layering it on

top of the old.
• Accommodation occurs when a learner must change previously learn information
before placement of new information is possible.
• Explanation: Assimilation is like placing files in a file cabinet, while
accommodation is like needing to add new folders or rearranging existing ones.
 Constructivism is a learning theory
• Learning is an active process
 Knowledge is constructed from (and shaped
by) experience.
• Learning is a personal interpretation of the
world
• Emphasizes problem solving and
understanding
• Uses authentic tasks, experiences, settings,
assessments
 Content presented holistically –not in
separate smaller parts

Constructivism is a process –the instructor

 Adapt curriculum to address students’ suppositions

 Help negotiate goals and objectives with learners
 Pose problems of emerging relevance to students
 Emphasize hands on, real world experiences ‐ ‐
 Seek and value students’ points of view
 Social context of content

Constructivism is a process –the instructor

 Provide multiple modes of representations / perspectives on content

 Create new understandings via coaching, moderating , suggesting
 Testing should be integrated with the task and not a separate activity
 Use errors to inform students of progress to understanding and changes in ideas

Constructivism is a process –the student

 Help develop own goals and assessments

 Create new understandings (via coaching, moderating, suggesting)
 Control learning (reflecting)
 Member of community of learners
 Collaborate among fellow students
 Learn in a social experience –appreciate different perspectives
 Take ownership and voice in learning process

Constructivism is an instructional strategy

 Involves collaboration between instructors, students and others (community

members)
 Tailored to needs and purposes of individual learners
 Features active, challenging, authentic and multidisciplinary learning.

Constructivism is an instructional strategy

Constructivism can help students

 Pursue personal interests and purposes
 Use and develop his or her abilities
 Build on his or her prior knowledge and experiences
 Develop lifelong learning ‐

Constructivism encourages instructors to provide for

 each student’s
 Preferred learning style
 Rate of learning
 Personal interactions with other learners Source

Applying constructivism in the classroom

• Pose problems that are or will be relevant to students
• Structure learning around essential concepts
• Be aware that students’ points of view are windows into their reasoning
• Adapt teaching to address students’ suppositions and development
• Assess student learning in context of teaching

Pedagogy
 Various approaches in pedagogy derive from constructivist theory. They usually
suggest that learning is accomplished best using a hands-on approach.
 Learners learn by experimentation, and not by being told what will happen, and
are left to make their own inferences, discoveries and conclusions.

Strengths of Constructivism

• Children learn more, and enjoy learning more when they are actively involved,
rather than passive listeners.
• Education works best when it concentrates on thinking and understanding, rather
than on rote memorization. Constructivism concentrates on learning how to think and
understand.
• Constructivist learning is transferable. In constructivist classrooms, students create
organizing principles that they can take with them to other learning settings.
 Constructivism gives students ownership of what they learn, since learning is
based on students' questions and explorations, and often the students have a
hand in designing the assessments as well.
 Students in constructivist classrooms learn to question things and to apply their
natural curiosity to the world.
 Constructivism promotes social and communication skills by creating a classroom
environment that emphasizes collaboration and exchange of ideas.
 Constructivist assessment engages the students' initiatives and personal
investments in their journals, research reports, physical models, and artistic
representations.

Weakness of Constructivism

• The biggest disadvantage is its lack of structure. Some students require highly
structured environments in order to be able to excel.
• Constructivism calls for the teacher to discard standardized curriculum in favor or
a more personalized course of study based on what the student already knows.
This could lead some students to fall behind of others.
• It also removes grading in the traditional way and instead places more value on
students evaluating their own progress, which may lead to students falling behind
but without standardized grading and evaluations teachers may not know that the
student is struggling. Since there is no evaluation in the traditional sense, the
student may not be creating knowledge as the theory asserts, but just be copying
what other students are doing.

Constructivism summary

• Shifts emphasis from teaching to learning

• Individualizes and contextualizes students’ learning experiences
• Helps students develop processes, skills and attitudes
• Considers students’ learning styles
• Focuses on knowledge construction, not reproduction
• Uses authentic tasks to engage learners
• Provides for meaningful, problem based thinking ‐
• Requires negotiation of meaning
• Requires reflection of prior and new knowledge
• Extends students beyond content presented to them
 Experience (Formative Assessment)

1. Do a research: Students research a topic and present their findings on constructivism.

2. Look for / or create a short film showing constructivism theory

3. Create an inventory of activities and assessments for constructivism approach.

 Exchange

This module in Principles and theories in Language learning begins on how

children learn their first language. This background is important because both
second language research and teaching have been influenced by changes in our
understanding of how children acquire their first language. It was also discussed that
there are several theories which have been proposed to account for second
language acquisition, that there are similarities between first and language
acquisition. Included in the lesson are some of the characteristics of language
learning in the early stages, how important are imitation and practice are for
language learning.

Comparison and contrast were made in the different school of thoughts in

language learning, similar with natural and instructional environment for second
language acquisition. Part of the discussion is how individual learner characteristics
and different contexts for language learning may affect success. The discussion
includes issues such as the important of learner’s attitudes towards speakers of
other languages.

The information is presented in a way that does not assume that readers are
already familiar with theoretical issues or research methods. The lessons
summarizes important stages of developments in language acquisition theory. You
may also take a moment to reflect on your views about learning a language and the
implication of how it should be taught.

References

BOOKS

Brown, D.H. (n.d.). Principles of language teaching and learning. San Francisco State
University

Ligthbrown, P.M. and Spada, M. How languages are learned. Oxford University
Press, 2004

Fromkin, V, Rodman R. and Hyams N. An Introduction to Language. Heinle,

Thompson Corporation

ONLINE REFERENCES

https://slideplayer.com/slide/7405942/
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2019/ling001/acquisition.htm
l https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/processing-the-
environment/language/v/theories-of-language-development
 College of Principles & Theories of Language Acquisition &
Education Learning

Lesson 1 The Nature of Language and Learning 2

What is language? 2
Language learning 3
Knowledge, understanding & skills 4
(competencies)
Teaching and learning

Lesson 2 Theories of First Language (L1) Acquisition 7

Early Theorists 8
Theories and Approaches to Language 8
Learning 12
Types of Learning

Lesson 3 Stages in Child Language Acquisition 14

Stages of Language Acquisition in Children 14
Five Stages of Second Language 19
Acquisition
Lesson 4 Schools of Thought in Second Language 22
Acquisition 22
Grammar-Translation 24
Generative Linguistics 25
Other Uses of Generative 26
Memory

Lesson 5 Constructivism : Multidisciplinary Approach 30

Midterm Examination

38