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During the past weeks, we have seen two theories of how to learn a language : first, behaviorism which is based on learning though imitation and practice, that is positive reinforcement. This is something I would have agreed with even before studying it because that's also the reason why one is always advised to go live in a country to learn its language, which will be way more successful than learning vocabulary for example.. because interaction is what is the most important in learning something, speaking with a philosopher to exchange ideas, as well as speaking with a native person in order to get used to the hearing ! When I was a child, my mother sometimes spoke to me a little English, or in portugese, and even though it wasn't about grammar or precise rules, I think my ears have been used to English -as well as Portugese even though I don't speak it at all, but whenever I hear Brazilians speaking, I can recognize some words that I heard in lullabies for examples and I can understand some intonations, questions or little sentences that have been repeated in my childhood ! So that's why I think the environment is what builds our capacities in languages and our interactions in different languages. When children, human beings are more attentive to their environment so they will more likely reproduce what they hear, to integrate themselves in the life and the examples we saw like analogies or repetitions were very interesting to understand this first impression I had.
But then we studied the counter-current if one might say, which is the innatist perspective, that is the innate universal principle which says that children are programmed to learn if he is allowed and able to do so, by himself ! If a child has to walk, he will walk, even if alone without any help. This theory is very interesting -though I have more doubts on it because personally I think that even when being an adult, human beings are in constant imitation of the outside, of the others, being a good or bad thing, but it still is.. But it is interesting because the innatist perspective focuses more on the ability of the child, than on his situation as a child. It emphasises more the brain of the child, than the efforts made to make him lean.. and it is quite logical when we notice that children don't reproduce the same errors as adults ! Or at least not always: they reproduce the same sounds and words but they make them their own, they change the order of a sentence or use a noun instead of a adjective for exemple, and this process can't be due to the environment, so it might be part of the child's inner ability !

So both perspectives are interesting to be studiee because they state very funded theories, that can lead us to more reflection ! Now, I think that both theories can be blended.. That is to say, in my opinion, it is possible that children have a specific ability to learn, and a "good" moment to learn, because if they hadn't, then whichever their environment would be, they would never be able to learn a single thing ! So we are all programmed, as babies, to learn a language, to remember words, to classify information.. but, the environment has also a 70% job to my mind, because one can have abilities in something, if he never practices or learns concretely with people that know this thing, speaking in this case, the baby might no have enough capacity and power to learn by himself..

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Before the course, I agreed with the statement « languages are learned mainly by imitation » because most of people believe in it. And so I never did any researches about it and I always thought it was true. Moreover children keep on repeating what adults say.

Well, I learned that imitation is a theory of learning created by the behaviorists, who think that children are influenced by their environment and reproduce what they hear until they formed habits formation. It contrasts with the innatist perspective which promotes that human beings have innate abilities that allow them to use language.

However, I’ve learned that only 10 - 40% of speech is imitation (see Peter in chapter 1) and that children select what they want to imitate and then also not all children imitate. Therefore imitation isn’t the key of learning a language. So my beliefs was kind of wrong.

But I was right when thought that interaction is the key of learning a language. Indeed, babies who are exposed to television or radio have difficulties to assimilate new words whereas babies who interact with an adult is more inclined to acquire new words and to have a better comprehension (Lev Vygotsky observed interactions among children and adults and argued that in a supportive interactive environment, children are able to advance to higher levels of knowledge and performance).

Same as for imitation, I thought that correcting young children when they make grammatical errors was a good thing to do to make them learn grammar quicker. In fact, as we saw with the experience Braine did with his child; children are more focused on the meaning than on the phrasing. Grammar is not their first focus. They know how to make themselves understand and they don’t need any grammar.

I’ve learned that babies have a critical period in which they can learn any kind of language. After this period they are less up to learn new langages.

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We should all agree that we were biased when we tried to answer these questions at first. Biased because of our family, friends, and even medias/internet sometimes; disinformation is as accessible as legit and genuine intelligence.

My mistake was to answer
these questions based on my speculations rather than my own personal experience. As I learned more and more about how languages are mastered, I realised that I related to it all along. Especially when I wrote my linguistic biography, because I asked myself "How exactly did I learn French or English?"
The answer was: TONS OF THINGS HELPED ME IN A LOT OF WAYS.

Everything- my vocabulary, my grammar, my writting style, my syntax, my pronunciation, it all comes from people, music, videogames, movies, plays, silly yet creative advertisements, etc. A lot of dots could be connected here, what do they have all in common? What do they all share together? They all interact with you in a lot of different ways.

But as we saw during class, basic imitation has its limits. What if you think that using a double negative is fine just because you heard "Another brick in the wall" by Pink Floyd? or using wrong conjugation just because you heard John Lennon saying "But she don't care" in the song called "Ticket to Ride" (I might be using my own exemples to express the limits of imitation, but you know I'm a musician it helps), and that's when we saw that a lot of things are also happening beside this process of learning; critical thinking, logic...

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In my responses in our first class, I lightly agreed about this statement that languages are learned through imitation mostly, because I thought that it had a role to play, but I felt that direct interaction with people had a part of importance too in the process of learning a language. I can’t remember my answers on the Kahoot application, but I do remember a few things we talked about during the first lessons. I realized something that I did not know, or rather that I never really thought about before we talked about this; it is the importance of the age(Critical period hypothesis). That is to say, I never really thought that the months of a baby could make a difference in their perceptions of sound, depending on their environment, (I’m thinking of the experience between Japanese and American babies of 6-8 months and 10-12 months). I can’t really bring to light a pattern of my own experience of learning French language, because I think something happened in my brain without me to be aware of it, as some kind of click, which had allowed the mechanism of my memory to be activated. That is why, the first real memories that I have from learning language are the primary school lessons, with reading (in fact, especially the extension of it at home, I remember my mother ‘testing’ my reading with a collection called “J’aime Lire”), the alphabet, the French grammar lessons, etc. I answered that correcting directly a child on his grammar was not a thing to do because I already thought that it would have as an effect to make the child even more in the confrontation, or maybe humiliated, or the child would not learn because he would see the correction and opposition as an entertainment, even though I believe saying the opposite of what an adult would want him to say could represent a way to assert himself as a person (which can be good in the process of learning !). Concerning the example of the spoon with a daddy and his son, as Juliette said in her presentation, the danger of correction is also that children, students focus more on the meaning of sentences instead of their phrasings.
After classes and readings of Lightbown and Spada, I’m must admit something: I am not thinking the same about language learning anymore, but I also feel quite lost after all the theories I learned about. Initially I felt that the behaviourist theory was the one I was the closer to, because it is based on selective imitation, just as this quote in the book explains (I found it striking): “Unlike a parrot who imitates the familiar and continues to repeat the same things again and again, children appear to imitate selectively”. So, Behaviourist approach confirms my initial view about the role of imitation in language learning, but later in the chapter, the logical problem of language acquisition made me doubt on my initial state of mind. It deals with the theory that I quote “children’s minds are not blank slates to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment”. Maybe it is not so far of what I felt at first, when I talked about a click. Maybe this click is the beginning in a child’s mind when he starts to think by himself, build his thoughts and stops imitating selectively. I am not sure of anything, in the end, but perhaps it is not absolute, like one theory in THE theory, but there are some elements one can pick in each, and by this way structure his own reflexion. In the end, I think that this lecture of How Languages Are Learned is not like an absolute truth about how to learn a language, and that it has not destroyed my first feelings about the imitation in learning process, but it has given me some directions, some elements to refine my own theory about how to learn a language, or several by imitation and repetition and above all interactions with people.

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Languages are learned mainly through imitation. At the beginning of the lessons I agreed.

However, some research such as Patricia Kuhl's in neuroscience showed that babies have different ways of learning a language. For example, there is the taking statistic notion in which babies hear several times certain language features and are selecting what is important and what is not.

The Wug test by Gleason exposes the purpose of understanding words and their patterns and not simply repeating the words and not understanding them. In the test, the adult tells to a child an make-up word and the child has to give the plural form or the progressive form in a logical response, since repeating is useless.

Furthermore, we learned that children in fact choose what to imitate and what to practise. We see that children imitate 10 to 40% of what they hear. It is a selective process.

Those research conflict with my initial view on the subject.

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I used to believe (and I agreed when this question was asked on the first day) that languages are mostly learned through imitation. However, reading about the different theories on Lightbown & Spada made me realize that it's so much more than that.
There are so many variables to take into account: the interaction factor which I already knew about (but hadn't really taken the time to conceptualize), the timing (the critical period being one of the most productive when it comes to learning), and the creativity factor as well (with children making up words sometimes, based on a grammar rule they already know).

It appears children are intuitively able to pick up on the most important words of sentences as well, which shows in the way they learn, for example, during the stages where they learn how to form a correct negative sentence, or question (although they do make mistakes of course, but that is besides the point).

I also slightly agreed to "Learner's errors should be corrected as soon as they are made", but last week's lecture made me realize that it was wrong. Wrong because to someone who speaks, the content matters more and they may get destabilized or defensive if someone picks up on errors in the form itself, especially on the spur of the moment.

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Languages are learned mainly by imitation. I agree somewhat. But based on our lesson I understood that children not only copy adult’s speech, they also have their own logics.The critical period is very important period for children-a period in which babies try to master language , a window of opportunity for learning. Despite beliefs, not all children imitate. In Lighbown and Spada, research is cited that it will be many months before baby’s own vocaliratiens begin to reflect the characteristics of the language they hear still before they connect language sounds with meaning(p6). I also learned that children don’t use temporal adverbs such as “yesterday” or “tomorrow” until they develop some understanding of time. In class we learned about behaviorism , the farther of behaviorism is Pavlov. I’ve head a lot about this scientist , not far from my home in Russia there is The Pavlov Academy and his hospital. So, this example was especially interesting for me. I learned the theory about behavior and new way to study humans. Pavlov noticed that the dog’s begun to drool whenever they saw lab coats, even if there was no food in sight. He ran a study in which he rang a bell every time he fed the dogs. Soon, just ringing a bell made the dogs salivate. Pavlov demonstrated conditioning on dogs, but psychologist Watson proved that it happens in humans too. In class we were told about the examples with rats and little Albert. However, Chomsky argued that the behaviorist theory failed to account for the logical problem of language acquisition. He believed that children don’t only imitate language they hear, but they are born with a specific innate ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a natural language they are exposed to.

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Before this course, I believed that languages are learned through imitation, reading and being taught by someone that could correct you immediately. But I wasn’t completely in the wrong when I also thought that teachers should teach one rule at a time and that learners do not copy each others’s mistake when interacting in a free group. In my own language learning experience, I barely talked about my learning of my first language which is french, as I don’t recall anything from this lesson. All I knew was that I read a lot, hence my answers to the questions. I learned English at a very young age, through school which also explains my perspective on learning and teaching. However, we saw in class that imitation is not enough to learn a language. We learned about the innatist perspective on how children learn a language. Innatists believes that we are biologically programed for language, that we have « an innate ability that allows us to underlie the rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a natural language ». They call this ability the universal grammar. What they saw is that imitation and practice is not enough for a child to learn how to speak. A study showed that only a few percentage of children actually imitate and practice. Moreover, children do not copy the adult’s or other children’s mistakes (like unfinished sentences, slips of the tongue, stutter) and manages to formulate sentences of their own, with their own logic: in « How Languages are Learned » we see that Randall formulates the verb « to doc » from the noun « doctor » on the same principle as « to act » from the noun  « actor » (p.25).

I also learned in class that reading is not the best way to learn vocabulary. It is a good way to learn vocabulary but the children’s exposure to knew word is almost permanent: on the radio, on the TV… The most important thing stays the same: interaction. There are different perceptions on what kind of interaction the child needs. Piatget believed that language was « a symbol system that could be used to express knowledge acquired through interaction with the physical world ». On the other hand, Bygotsky though it was « essentially internalized speech and speech emerged in social interaction » that the children needed the most. An experiment was made with a child named Jim who had deaf parents: the only interaction he was was through indirect speech (television, radio, etc…) and it showed that he was well below age level in all aspects of language. However, his small brother Glenn ended up not having the same issue as he had Jim as a role model and as a partner to exchange with.

Finally, I was persuaded that children needed to be taught in order to successfully learn a language. I somewhat agreed that teachers had to teach one rule at a time but didn’t knew back then that children only learn through stages. They focus on what they need in the moment and what they are interested in instead of wanting to absorb rules all at once. I was also convinced that teachers had to correct children on the spot while they had made an error. However, we saw in class that children more often focuses on the meaning instead of the phrasing. Martin Braine experienced these two elements in 1971 with his son « Another one spoon, Daddy ». In his exchange with his son, we can clearly see the son’s mechanism who focuses more on the meaning (his wish for another spoon) than on the phrasing (not understanding that his father his trying to correct him).

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During the study of the chapter one of the How Languages are Learned how children learn their first language. A lot of studies and hypothesis have been made on it and we know today that imitation is a decisive factor in the learning of a language. We saw that the six first month of the life of a baby is called a "critical period" during wich babies, no matter their origins, are the most receptive to sounds like the experience with the sounds "R" and "L" made with Japanese and US babies; where we saw that they react equally to each sounds even knowing that Japanese Language doesn't separate "R" and "L" sounds.

During this critical period, any baby is receptive to any language, if they are exposed to it for a long period of time, their childhood, and with interactions with living beings like siblings or adults, they can perfectly learn any languages.

However a language cannot be learned only through imitation.
Indeed children begin to learn grammar and languages by imitating others, and if they hear wrong grammar terms, they will repeat them, and they can not be automatically corrected (maybe because others also have the same bad habit).
And even if you are exposed to an other language during your first months of life, if you suddenly stop the exposition, the second language will no longer be saved because the brain only keep the informations he needs the most to grow, and keep a second langage in mind when you don't practice it with anybody is not his first priority, and he will eventually forget it.

But learn a language doesn't require a high intelligence. The decisive factor when you are not a young child and you still want to learn a language is motivation.
motivation and the love for communication.
Even if you don't speak your second language fluently, you will always find a way to express yourself if you are motivated.
People need to master a lot of basic rules of grammar to speak in a second language, but self confidence is also a decisive factor to speak fluently to people in their language, even if your native language makes some interferences.

To learn a second language when you are a grown up child needs grammar rules, a lot of readings to stimulate your brain to "see" the words (but only readings that you like and you can understand at your level, no need to rush the steps), and practice it with someone with who you are ease to talk to.
talking with someone more experienced is a good way of imitation, but point out the errors by neglecting the improves is not a good strategy of learning.
Same as learning in groups doesn't necessarily mean that everyone will notice potential errors of grammar.
Bad habits need to be corrected and basic rules have to be mastered before the complex ones, but only stay on something that the students have already seen narrows their point of view and they can't compare with other structures.

And finally students are capable to make themselves their own researches. Class is a good environnement to learn about both grammar and speaking, but only in a conventional way; knowing being polite and stand a cordial conversation. Speak directly with some foreign friends are a good training to learn how to befriend and become more intimate with people, and not just speak about politics, management meals and what you have learned at school.