Principles of Language teaching and second language acquisition theories

Kevin Steven Morales Hinestroza

Gran Colombia University – Education Sciences

First of all, in language teaching throughout the years Professors as well as School teachers

have been created some theories about how to teach and how our brain acquires language a

new language. To start we have behaviorism that is, in a certain way, the way we teach our

pets to do thing we want them to do. For example, if I am trying to learn past simple the

teacher will tell me “Please repeat after me” and if I misspell the word, he put me a bad

grade, that’s kind of teaching based on bad action, punishment, reaction, and good action,

reward, reaction, is not obsolete but that is not the west way to learn a new language.

Somewhen in the history of teaching, people like Noah Chomsky came with a different type

of though talking about language acquisition, to him, the human body has the LAD (language

acquisition device) which is the one on charge of learn symbolic language and with this we

have also the comprehensible input by Krashen. Krashen said that humans just learned in one

and just in one way, and it is when we understand messages, we don’t need to understand a

whole phrase to give it a meaning, we just need to know two or three words to make it

understandable is the same with language acquisition, only the message is necessary this one

is received by the LAD and there is when we started to learn a new language.