James Matthew G.

Aguila BAEL 1 - A
ELS - 102 10 / 25 / 21

Buyer’s Mindset Theory

There are many theories of first language development and second language
acquisition out there and each one of them has different stands. I was able to look into
the different perspectives of different known people in that field and just the thought of
how they are able to come up with these theories motivated me to go search for more
knowledge and analyze everything that is written. After understanding the various
readings about the said topic, I have decided to also make my own theory as to how
language is learned.

I understand how our brain operates. I considered that as one of my reasons as

to why people have this kind of mindset when talking about language learning. It is
evident that a lot of processes take place inside our brain, and so, I think it is vital that
we are knowledgeable about the basics of how our brain does all of these things. Just
to give basic information, the brain is divided into two sides : the right hemisphere and
the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere is more responsible for creative thinking,
imagination,art, music , and even emotional intelligence. While on the left hemisphere, it
is more responsible for analytical thinking,math, logic , and language.

The moment we are born, we are left unprotected from all of the sounds that we
hear around us and this results in us acquiring vocabularies and that is what we know
as our first language. I think to myself that during our childhood, we are being served
by mouthfuls of words everyday and we absorb it through our ears going to our brains
even if we do not yet know the meaning of them. But when we are trying to learn a
second language, we have this mindset of allowing ourselves to learn only those that
are essential and relevant. For instance , why should one learn the second language
translation of some words that are not even used or spoken frequently? Another, if we
are tasked to communicate through our second language, then it would be very
practical if we start learning those words that are regularly used. That is why I named it
the buyer’s mindset theory because when we are still young, we would want to buy
everything that we see in the market or in the mall, and that is normal. But as we grow
older, we already have prior knowledge as to what needs to be bought and that results
in us buying only those that are important, therefore leaving out the non essential
things when we do our shopping. This means only that learning a second language is
difficult , and so it would be of great help if we could weigh in our ways on how we
would want to learn it.

Some advantages of this theory is that it explains how we learn our first
language in a real world setting and how one can easily communicate to native
speakers through the use of a number of words that one has learned in second
language acquisition. On the other hand, the major drawback is that one cannot or
would have difficulty in understanding and conveying his message to his listener in a
deeper conversation since it would require the speaker to have a high level of second
language comprehension and proficiency.

To summarize briefly, the “Buyer's Mindset Theory” focuses on the concept of

individuals having this characteristic of learning their first language through the
exposure that they have with their surroundings. In terms of second language
acquisition, we are exposed to a setting where everything is accessible but this time we
are only limited to learning our second language by filtering out and choosing only
selected words and phrases that are frequently used in daily conversations.