Language Acquisitio

nLara Grace A. Abaleta

What is the difference between Language

Acquisition and Language Learning?

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION LANGUAGE LEARNING

Focuses on learning through communication

Learning through form (such grammatical structures)

Subconscious, informal, natural

Conscious, formal, unnatural

Grammar structures are learned later on

Grammar rules are prioritized to learn how to communicate

Does not require tedious drills

Requires drills for practice and evaluation that learners may find boring and tiresome

Speaking and communicating would be easier because it is in the system of the learner

Learners will struggle to communicate or speak and write effectively

Stable order of acquisition Simple to complex order of learning

Stages of Language

Acquisition

PRE-PRODUCTION

• Also called the “silent” period• The student takes in the new

language but does not speak it; they can respond non-verbally

• The teacher should not force the learner to talk; they can ask the them to point, draw, act out, label

• Lasts six weeks or longer, depending on the individual

EARLY PRODUCTION

• Can understand more than can produce

• The individual begins to speak using short words, phrases

• Emphasis is still on listening and absorbing new language

• Errors will be committed many times

SPEECH EMERGENCE

• Speech becomes more frequent; words and sentences are longer

• Still relies heavily on context clues and familiar topics

• Interlanguage occurs (a mixture of vocabulary and structures from both languages)

• Vocabulary continues to increase• Errors begin to decrease, especially in

common or repeated interactions

BEGINNING FLUENCY

• Speech is fairly fluent in social situations with minimal errors

• New contexts and academic language are challenging

• The individual will struggle to express themselves due to gaps in vocabulary and appropriate phrases.

INTERMEDIATE FLUENCY• Communicating in the second language is

fluent, especially in social language situations

• The individual is able to speak almost fluently in new situations or in academic areas, but there will be gaps in vocabulary knowledge and some unknown expressions.

• There are very few errors, and the individual is able to demonstrate higher order thinking skills in the second language such as offering an opinion or analyzing a problem.

ADVANCED FLUENCY• The individual communicates fluently in

all contexts and can maneuver successfully in new contexts and when exposed to new academic information.

• At this stage, the individual may still have an accent and use idiomatic expressions incorrectly at times, but the individual is essentially fluent and comfortable communicating in the second language.

Theories on Language Acquisition

Behaviorism• developed by B.F. Skinner in 1957• This theory believes that infants learn oral language

from other human role models through a process involving imitation, reward and practice. Human role models in an infant’s environment provide the stimuli and rewards (Cooter & Reutzel, 2004).

• It also argues that everything we know we have learned through interactions with our environment. They say that, rather than being biologically predisposed to learn language, we learn language through reinforcement -- by giving praises and encouragement - and shaping -- letting them try to improve.

Behaviorism • Focuses on immediately perceptible

aspects of linguistic behavior—the publicly observable—and the relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them.

• This theory was an extension of his general theory of learning by Operant Conditioning – the conditioning in which the organism emits a response or operant without necessarily observable stimuli.

Tabula Rasa• Skinner believed that all children are

born with a blank slate called “Tabula Rasa”, and so a key influence into learning language is through the interaction ideally by the parents/guardians.

Empiricism

• Holds that children are genetically equipped to learn

• The individual is not born with the knowledge he or she gains over the life span

• Believes that a child’s language is not innate but develops as a result of experiences

Nativism

• The term nativist is derived from the fundamental assertion that language acquisition is innately determined.

• Essentially says that we have an innate predisposition to learn language.

• It states that we are born with a built-in device of some kind that predisposes us to language acquisition, resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Findings:• Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children

learn language not as a series of separate discrete items, but as an integrated system.

• Using simple non-sense word test, she discovered that as young as four years old, children apply rules in:– Plurality– Present progressive– Past tense– Third singular– Possessives

• In 1960s, the early grammars of child language is referred to as pivot grammar.

Sentence → Pivot word + Open word

Examples:My toy No milkThat chair Baby shoes

Mentalism

• Holds that “knowledge primarily derives from inborn mental processes”

• Language is governed by rules• Child is born with a mental capacity

for working-out the underlying systems

• Nature vs. Nurture

Language Acquisition Deviceby Noam Chomsky

• Chomsky believed in the existence of a mind/brain, and within it, a specialized language faculty - which he named the Language Acquisition Device.

• LAD controls the development of language

• Claims that children acquire language skills more rapidly than other abilities

Plato’s Problem• From this LAD concept, Chomsky created the

idea "Plato's Problem" which is a concept that questions if we are born with blank slates or “Tabula Rasa”, where nothing makes sense without structure, how do we make sense of the first things we experience? Therefore concluding that we must be born with an innate ability to do so.

Functional Approach

• Language was something you could hardly extract and detach from your cognitive and affective framework and consider separately.

• Linguistic rules written as mathematical equations failed to capture that ever-elusive facet language: meaning.

• It focuses on the functions of language.

Functional Approach• The relationships in which words

occur in telegraphic utterances are only superficially similar.For example: “Baby shoes”Three possible underlying relations:

- Agent-action- Agent-object- Possessor-possessed

Constructivism

• posits that the learner is ultimately in charge of his or her learning, that it results from both a cognitive processing and organizing of information within an individual or social aspect, where the learner interacts and dialogues with the problem, the context and the players to discover meaning and value.