Language Acquisition Theories by Hannah Aquino [Sunrise Mountain HS]

Tabula Rasa

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 18:43:49 UTC

Interesting how such an important part of the behaviorist theories don’t account for some of the natural language phases most children go through.

Benefits of behaviorism in education

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 18:49:48 UTC

Behaviorism has led to a lot of classroom management strategies like positive and negative reinforcement strategies

Behaviorism and Pavlov

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 18:54:47 UTC

Pavlov and the theories of classical conditioning are part of the behaviorist theories. How would classical conditioning be used in language development? Language repetition and the positive reinforcement of being understood seems like a form of classical conditioning.

“Infants come into the world prewired for linguistic analysis”

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:02:19 UTC

Infants are prewired for linguistic analysis and parents are prewired to impart linguistic knowledge. We’re hardwired to speak to babies in high-pitched voices and use elongated syllables which helps babies understand us better! Even if they don’t understand the language itself their brains interact with our tones and words

Hypothesis testing

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:04:44 UTC

It’s like how toddlers usually first ask to be picked up by saying, “Hold you!” All three of my kids did it. Because we, as adults ask them “Do you want me to hold you?” And so they hypothesize that “hold you” is the phrase needed in order to get picked up.

Behaviorism vs Innatism

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:15:10 UTC

It’s always interesting to see how the pendulum swings back and forth between theories. Behaviorism theorized we taught children everything and innatism theorized that we teach children almost nothing!

Interactionist Theory: the perfect blend

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:21:00 UTC

Like I said earlier, behaviorism was one extreme and innatism was the other extreme. And now Interactionism is the blend between the two: nature and nurture combined

Interactionist Theory

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:26:59 UTC

Children develop language out of a desire to interact with the world around them. This feels like the most innate explanation to me because that is how it has felt with my own children! They would get so frustrated when they couldn’t be understood and language got so much clearer so quickly.

Scaffolding

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 19:28:29 UTC

Scaffolding language with young children is helpful for them, and it can also be helpful for older EL students as well.

Audiolingual Dialogue

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:19:02 UTC

This is the classic language learning scenario. People listening to recordings of the language they’re learning and repeating them over and over!

Errors

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:20:58 UTC

“Errors were to be corrected immediately to avoid forming bad habits.” This is good in theory but not super realistic!

“How well did this instruction work for you?”

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:24:30 UTC

Audiolingual methods are famously ineffective! It’s how I was “taught” Spanish in elementary school. We’d watch an hourly tv show program once or twice a week that had puppets and stories but in the end it was still just repetition and it was not effective at all.

Creative Construction Theory

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:29:10 UTC

The experiment written about in the text is a very interesting discovery! You would think they would make similar grammatical errors to their native language but English is a whole different beast!

Contrastive Analysis

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:35:58 UTC

It seems most common for people who speak Romantic languages to be able to learn another Romantic language more easily.

Question about Innatist Theory

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:43:33 UTC

I suppose the Innatist theory has already been disproved in terms of it being the perfect explanation, but wouldn’t the fact that it’s so difficult to learn a second language disprove that idea that language is totally innate?

Acquisition/Learning Hypothesis

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 20:56:37 UTC

This makes sense! And it reminds me of the whole “are you even listening to me?” Argument. Just because someone can repeat back the words you just said means they heard you, not that they listened to you.

Monitor Hypothesis

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 21:03:56 UTC

“The focus of language teaching should be communication, not rote rule learning.” I think we forget that sometimes as educators. We want students to master English and its grammar because we want them to be able to communicate, not just pass a test.

Good summary of the hypotheses

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 21:07:29 UTC

Natural order: ‘what is learned early in one language is learned early by others’

Negotiation of Meaning

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 21:13:06 UTC

I have had this type of interaction with my husband! My husband was born in the Philippines and learned English as his second language when he moved to America at age 6. He is proficient in English but he still occasionally does not recognize or understand idioms. So I have had this experience when I’ve said things like, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and he has asked me to repeat it, says he doesn’t get it, etc. and I know to clarify.

Output

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 21:16:57 UTC

Interactionist theory reminds me of the previous hypotheses’ statements about how we learn language to communicate. ELLs can learn a lot from communicating through social interactions and therefore we need to look at ELLs output more fully in order to understand their language acquisition process.

Treatment of Errors

aquinhc — 2024-06-26 21:21:01 UTC

“Errors that imped communication will be corrected naturally as meaning is negotiated; some errors may require explicit corrective instruction.” I like this idea that sometimes explicit corrective instruction will be needed but that we can also rely on errors to be resolved as the learner continues to increase their knowledge.