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Professor Jack C. Richards - Writing in a second language

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Professor Jack C. Richards - Writing in a second language

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Professor Jack C. Richards - Writing in a second language

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LINGUISTICS AS A WINDOW TO UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN

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LINGUISTICS AS A WINDOW TO UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN

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NATURE & NURTURE AROUND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LEARNING

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NATURE & NURTURE AROUND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION & LEARNING

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Five Stages of Second Language Acquisition

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Five Stages of Second Language Acquisition

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McREL - The Five Stages of Second Language Acquisition

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The critical period examined: Genie,A scientific tragedy

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The critical period examined: Genie,A scientific tragedy

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I recall these two terms: “Nature & Nurture” Genie was born with the capacity to acquire and to produce language but was unable to develop it due to her devastating environment. Additionally, Genie’s language development did not take place in the appropriate time. In Genie’s case, she needed some sort of positive input, a response, a hug, an answer back to her necessity to communicate ideas.

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From the TLC documentary 'Wild Child :The Story Of Feral Children'. Susan M. Wiley(B. Apr. 18. 1957) 6722 N. Golden West Ave. Arcadia,CA 91007 She was not a wild child, she was an extremely abused child. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgnjRY_Z7w http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4804490&page=1#.UYgsK0odfCp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdycJQi4QA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3oy6vK7gsg http://www.cultureunplugged.com/play/7847/Born-Genius--My-Brilliant-Brain

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Merrill Swain and The Output Hypothesis: the interactionist perspective

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Merrill Swain and The Output Hypothesis: the interactionist perspective

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According to Merrill Swain, there is a huge importance of output to learning and that it could be that output pushes learners to process language more deeply –with mental effort– than does input. With output, the learner is in charge. Output may stimulate learners to think more and this claim may lead to proficiency and accuracy when producing the L2. The article stresses the importance of interaction for second language learning (Can this interaction be done during any stage of the second language acquistion). I do believe so. I do believe that interaction pushes a student to use the language in context and to look for resources for a better negotiation of meaning. Since I am a second language learner, I can give evidence that interaction can help be a better communcator of the L2. One role of output in second language learning is that it may promote “noticing”. For example, when I was speaking English to a native speaker, there was something that was misunderstood. At first, I did not know what it was but then when I asked the person, she said that she had not understood “this” and “that” This feedback gave me the opportunity to fix a linguistic problem in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation that was causing an obstruction in my communication. After resolving it, the message was clear enough for the conversation to continue. Another strategy that can be used is “repetition”, “confirmation checks” and, “clarification checks”. There is no doubt that taking part in interactions will make it easier for language development. Additionally, interactions will help students self analyze, self assess, and self review  what they know.

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“Language doesn’t come in neat packets, ready for the baby to digest and absorb. Every moment of a baby’s life is a wild cocktail party, where the sound of language is embedded within the ambient acoustics that constantly bombard his eardrums” (Yang, C. 2006)

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Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain | Big Think

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How different is learning an L2 as opposed to an L1?
How is it that all normal children learn to see, hear, walk, and...talk? Yet we would never ask whether the first three were "social" or not. Everything human is designed to be social a priori. Except in rare cases, all children in every language community will acquire their native language, just as they will manage the other three things too. That is probably not a coincidence. For what purposes they use the language and what is valued about language within that community is determined largely by sociocultural factors such as education, literacy, dialect prestige, and the perception of power. Provided it happens early enough and is introduced with the same consistency, bilingualism is also inevitable and normal worldwide.

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Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition Part 1 of 2

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Filmed talk by S.Krashen - You can watch as is or you can use Self Access note-taking Task THP V 9 on Self Access page in your wiki

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The main difference between deep and shallow orthographies is in the consistency in the  relationship between the graphemes (the written symbols) and phonemes (the abstract units of sound). Shallow, transparent, regular, or consistent orthography means that the correspondence between letters and sounds (graphemes/phonemes) in the writing system are close to one-to-one. As an example, Finnish has 23 associations that match the exact number of letters, which means that when a speaker of Finnish reads a passage in his/her language to an audience, the listeners will be able to comprehend what the speaker is saying. Spanish language also has a shallow orthography. Since I was a child, I clearly remember being immersed in a phonics based approach: seeing examples, listening and writing down the letters and the sounds, putting consonants and letters together to make syllables, then words and, finally, sentences.

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This quote will always remind me of how powerful is for an individual to be able to speak two or more languages instead of one; to be able to enrich his/her own culture by adding another; to be able to appreciate others' cultures with minimum doses of judgement.

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Language acquisition vs Language learning

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Language acquisition vs Language learning

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Krashen claims that there is no fundamental difference between the way we acquire our first language and the subsequent languages.
There are two ways of developing language ability: by acquisition and by learning. Acquisition is a sub-conscious process, as in the case of a child learning its own mother tongue or an adult “picking up” a second language  simply by being immersed in the second language community.  Whereas learning is the conscious process of developing a foreign language through language lessons and a focus on the grammatical features of that language.