Rianto

KEY CONCEPTS IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

AND LANGUAGE EDUCATION

A. Goal in Language Learning and Language Education

Before knowing the key concept of language learning and language

education, it is important to know why someone needs to learn language.

According to Davies et al there are at least 5 goals to learn language, such

as follow:1

1. linguistic competence, which includes the knowledge of vocabulary,

grammar, semantics, and phonology that have been the traditional focus of

second language learning;

2. Discourse competence, which enables speakers to engage in continuous

discourse, e.g., by linking ideas in longer written texts, maintaining longer

spoken turns, participating in interaction, opening conversations and

closing them;

3. Pragmatic competence, which enables second language speakers to use

their linguistic resources in order to convey and interpret meanings in real

situations, including those where they encounter problems due to gaps in

their knowledge;

4. Sociolinguistic competence, which consists primarily of knowledge of

how to use language appropriately in social situations, e.g., conveying

suitable degrees of formality, directness and so on;

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 5. Sociocultural competence, which includes awareness of the background

knowledge and cultural assumptions which affect meanings and which

may lead to misunderstandings in intercultural communication.

B. Processes of Second Language Learning

Actually, there are two main kinds of previous language knowledge which

second language learners can use in order to make sense of the new language

they encounter. The first is their knowledge of their mother tongue (transfer)

and the second is the knowledge they already possess about the second

language itself (generalization)

1. Transfer

Particularly when the second language shares a wide range of structures

with the mother tongue, transfer is a powerful process that can already

take the learner deep into the new system. For example, the structure “aku

makan roti” in Indonesian has the same structure in English, where “aku”

is the subject, “makan” is the verb, and “roti” is the object. The language

learner can easily transfer the sentence into “I eat bread” since there is no

grammatical change in that sentence. However, there are many structures

in Indonesian than cannot be transferred structurally into the English

language which resulted many common error in language learning. For

example, transferring the clause “buku gambar” from Indonesia would

resulted “ book drawing” in English. This one of the reason, ntil the

1960s, it was generally assumed that transfer (often labeled negatively

 “interference”) was not only a hindrance to learning but also the only

major cause of error (Brooks, 1960).

2. Generalization

The ability to go “beyond the information given” in experience and make

generalizations, which can then be used to understand and create new

instances of experience, is fundamental to learning. This means the

learner do not need to learn every vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar

in the second language. They can use the previous knowledge related to

that. For example, the word “opened” is the past verb from “open”, thus

the learner can easily add the morpheme “ed” for the present verb to make

it to past verb. However, the same as transfer, this rule cannot be applied

to everything. Over use of this rule resulted to “overgeneralization” where

the learner applied the rule overally. For example, the learner

overgeneralize the word “go” into “goed” instead of “went”.

Generalization and overgeneralization errors occur not only within the

learner’s developing linguistic competence but also at higher levels of

discourse. For example, the phrase What’s the matter? is often

overgeneralized by Chinese speakers in Hong Kong from situations where

a person is in some difficulty to other situations where help is requested.

Thus one may enter a travel agency in Hong Kong and be greeted not

with (say) “Can I help you?” but with What’s the matter
3. Transfer and generalization combined

Transfer and generalization are related in that each is a way of using prior

knowledge to make sense of what is new. We would therefore expect to

encounter many instances where previous mother tongue knowledge and

previous second language knowledge combine to offer the learner a

similar way of making sense of new second language data.

4. Simplification

A speaker omits elements that are redundant and produces something

similar to the “telegraphic speech” found in early mother tongue

acquisition. Such as the use of “teacher talk” in the classroom interaction

where the teacher simplify the vocabulary and her speech during the

interaction with the learner in the classroom

5. Imitation

Imitation (leading through repetition to memorization) was a cornerstone

of the learning process. Even though it has been rejected but now

recognized as a significant process. Learners often produce as a means of

coping with common or important situations in their environment.

Evidence that the phrases result from imitation comes from the fact that

the learner’s other output shows no evidence that he or she has mastered

the grammar that underlies them. Thus a learner may regularly use

phrases such as the one mentioned earlier – I don’t know how to do it – at

an early stage of learning, when he or she never otherwise uses either the

full negative “I don’t . . .” or “how + infinitive . . .” as productive

 patterns. This means that environment also play a vital role in the

language learning. Furthermore the teacher is obligated to give the good

example for the student to imitate it correctly. For example, if the teacher

do not pronounce the word correctly, it may result to the error in the

students’ pronunciation. This is very important in the early stage of

language learning. if the students imitate the mistakes that have been

exposed to them, this may result to “fossilized error” which is hard to fix.

6. Conscious and unconscious learning processes

The four processes mentioned in this section – transfer, generalization,

simplification and imitation – may all occur either subconsciously or

consciously. In natural situations, we may expect them to occur almost

always subconsciously, while the second language learner/speaker

focuses on the meanings which are communicated. In formal learning

situations, it is of course very common for these processes to be raised to

consciousness. It has been confirmed that sucessful learners generally use

a greater number of active learning strategies. It has identified strategies

which fall into four broad categories: metacognitive strategies (e.g.,

planning one’s learning time), cognitive strategies (e.g., techniques for

memorizing vocabulary), affective strategies (e.g., ways to deal with

frustration and increase motivation), and social strategies (e.g., joining a

group as a peripheral participant and pretending to understand)

C. The Effects of Classroom Instruction

It is clear that instruction has effects on learning in the case of those

many second language speakers whose ability comes only from classroom

instruction, supplemented perhaps by a limited amount of outside-class

practice

1. The rate and course of learning

Several studies have provided evidence that instruction can accelerate the

rate of learning. Learners acquired the rules more quickly than learners

who were exposed to input containing the structures but received no

instruction. This the main evidence for Pienemann’s “learnability” or

“teachability” hypothesis, according to which instruction (in some areas

of language at least) can accelerate the rate of learning but not cause

learners to skip a natural stage. Other areas of language may be more

flexible and teachable at any time.

2. Focus on form

There is evidence where explicit focus on formal aspects of language is

helpful and produces lasting improvement in performance. a “natural

approach” to language teaching in which there is no error-correction or

explicit focus on form is good, but the learner would not able to produce

utterance that has the correct grammar. However, giving the students

instruction to focus on form produces lasting improvement in

performance.
D. Technology

There are three major ways that technology and language

learning/education have interfaced in modern times. They are computer-

mediated contact with other languages/cultures, the use of corpora to inform

language teaching materials (and methods), and Internet-delivered language

instruction.

1. Computer-mediated contact

Learners can engage with other learners of the same language or even

with native speakers of the language they are studying. This might take

the form of students’ interacting in chat rooms or outside of class in

online discussions with classmates. The opportunity for students to make

contact with others in chat rooms and social networking sites has a

positive influence on student motivation. Students who do not see the

point of learning a foreign language find interacting with someone who

speaks the other language very motivating

2. The use of corpora to inform language teaching materials and methods

Every day one learns about a new corpus being developed. Each corpus

acts as a database for some language written, or when transcribed, oral

data, to, as I mentioned earlier, inform language teaching materials.

Access to corpora comprising millions of words of text, makes it easy to

discern usage patterns, which traditional grammars and descriptions of

language have missed. In addition, a teacher can find new and better

strategies by searching it on corpus.

 3. Internet-delivered language instruction.

Another advantage of Web-based instruction is that it provides access to

languages that might not be offered locally. For instance, earlier this year,

the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA), went live with its

Web-based instructional programmes in Azeri and the Iraqi dialect of

Arabic. This development allows UCLA to send language instruction to

other campuses of the University of California system, and in turn to

receive instructional programmes in Danish, Filipino, Khmer, and Zulu

from the University of California, Berkeley, which may present a partial

solution to the problem of keeping robust the less commonly taught, even

endangered, languages

E. Other Studies related with Key Concepts in Language Learning and

Language Education

1. The importance of conscious attention to form or noticing

Schmidt suggested some influences of ‘noticing’ as follows：

a. The more frequent a form, the more likely it is to be noticed and then

become integrated in the interlanguage system.” This means that

language features which learners notice are frequent in formal

instruction because teachers will repeat them. From this point of view,

it can be said that formal instruction encourages learners to notice the

form.
b. The more salient a form, the more likely it is to be noticed. In formal

instruction, specific forms are initially focused on and learners will

notice the linguistic salience more easily.

c. “Instruction is crucial.” This implies that learners must select relevant

features to focus on in input as there are a lot of different features in

input.

d. Learners’ skill level includes how well individuals are able to

routinize previously met structures This processing ability in turn

determines how ready learners are to notice forms in input. This idea

proposes that learners should cultivate their own proficiency and if

teachers help them, it will be more profitable. Schmidt also said that

individual ability to attend to both form and meaning in L2

e. Ellis (1997) suggested that language features may be made

intentionally prominent or that the task should be designed to force

learners to process the language. This means also that specific ways of

instruction is effective for L2 learning. Thus, instruction provides a lot

of different features of language which assist noticing. Consequently,

noticing plays an important role for second language learning and

instruction is an efficacious method of acquisition.