2. LANGUAGE, LEARNING AND TEACHING
Current issues in second language acquisition:
Who? Who does the learning and teaching?
What? Is the learner must learn and teacher must teach
How? How does learning take place?
When? When does second language learning take place?
Where? Are the second languages leaners attempting to acquire second language within the cultural
and linguistic milieu?
Why? Why are learners attempting to acquire the second language?
Learning and teaching:
1. Learning is acquisition or getting
2. Learning is retention of information or skill.
3. Retention implies storage systems, memory, cognitive organization.
4. Learning involves active, conscious focus and acting upon events outside or inside the organism.
5. Learning is relatively permanent but subject to forgetting.
6. Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice.
7. Learning is a chance in behavior.
Chapter 1
3. Schools of thought in Second Language Acquisition
• Early 1900s, 1940s and 1950s. Main represents Leonard
Bloomfield. Edward Sapir, Charles Fries and others.
• Typical themes: Description, observable performance,
Scientific method, Empiricism, Surface structure, Conditioning
reinforcement
Structuralism and
behaviorism
• 1960s, and 1970s. Main represents: Noam Chomsky.
• Typical themes: Generative linguistics Acquisition, Innateness
interlanguage Systematicity, Universal grammar competence,
Deep structure
Rationalism and
cognitive
Psychology
• 1960s, and 1970s. Main represents: Jean Piaget, Lev
Vygotsky.
• Typical themes: Interactive discourse, Sociocultural variables,
Cooperative group learning, Interlanguage variability,
Interactionist hypothesis
Constructivism
4. FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
• Constructivist
• Socio interaction
• Cognition and
language
• Functions of
language
• discourse
• Innate predispositions
• Systematic, rule-
governed acquisition
• Creative construction
• Pivot grammar
• Parallel distributed
processing
• Mediating
response
(Rm)
• Tabula rasa
• Stimuli:linguistic
responses
• Conditioning
• reinforcement
Behaviorist
Mediation
theory
FunctionalNativist
Theories of
First Language
Acquisition
Chapter 2
5. AGE AND ACQUISITION
The critical
period
Hypothesis
Neurological
considerations
The
significance
of accent:
Cognitive
considerations
Affective
considerations
Linguistic
considerations
-Bilingualism -
Interference
between first second
languages
-Interference in
adults
-Order of acquisition
A biological
period of life
when
language can
be acquired
more easily
and beyond
which time
language is
increasingly
difficult to
acquire
-Hemispheric
lateralization
-Biological
Timetables
-Right-
hemispheric
participations
-Anthropological
evidence
Muscles used
in articulations
of human
speech, a
tremendous
degree of
muscular
control is
required to
achieve the
fluency of
native speaker
of language
-Stages of
intellectual
development in
child:
-Sensory stage
(birth to two)
-Preoperational
stage (ages two
to seven)
-Operational
stage (ages
seven to
sixteen)
We are
influenced by
emotions:
Inhibitions
Language ego
Second identity
Attitudes
Peer pressure
Issues in first
language acquisition
revised
Competence and performance
Comprehension and production
Nature or nurture?
Universals
Systematicity and Variability
Language and thought
Imitation
Practice
Input
Discourse
Difference between child
and adult acquiring a
language.
The
comparison
and contrast
Chapter 3
6. HUMAN LEARNING
Chapter 4
Pavlov classical behaviorism: Learning process consist on formation of associations between stimuli and reflexive responses
Skinner’s operant conditioning: The events of stimuli -the reinforcers- that follow a response and that tend to strengthen
behavior or increase the probability of a recurrence of that response constitute a powerful force in control human behavior.
Ausubel’s meaningful learning theory: Learning takes place in the human organism through a meaningful process of
relating new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts or propositions.
Roger’s humanistic psychology: Analyzed human behavior in general, including learning process, by means of the
presentations of nineteen formal principles of human behavior. He studied the hole person, cognitive and physical but primarily
emotional.
Types of intelligences : Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Special, Musical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal
intelligence
7. Transfer
The carryover previous
performance or
knowledge to
subsequent learning
Interference
The previously
learned material
interferes with
subsequent
material
Overgeneralization
a particular subset of
generalization
Transfer, interferente
and
overgeneralization
Inductive reasoning
Stores a number of
specific instances and
induces a general law
or rule or conclusion
that governs of
subsumes the specific
instances
Deductive reasoning
Is a movement from a
generalization to
specific instances
Inductive
Deductive
Inductive and deductive
reasoning
8. Process: all human beings
engage in certain universal
processes
Style: consistent and rather
enduring tendencies or
preferences within an
individual
Strategy: specific methods
of approaching a problem
or task, modes of operation
for achieving a particular
end.
STYLES AND STRATEGIES
Chapter 5
9. Left-brain Dominance Right-brain Dominance
Intellectual
Remember names
Respond to verbal instructions and explanations
Experiments systematically and with control
Makes objective judgments
Planned and structures
Prefers established, certain information
Analytic reader
Reliance on language in thinking and
remembering
Prefers talking and writing
Prefers multiple-choice test
Control feelings
Not good at interpreting body language
Rarely use metaphors
Favors logical problem solving
Intuitive
Remember faces
Respond to demonstrated, illustrated or
symbolic instructions
Experiments randomly and with less restraint
Makes subjective judgments
Fluid and spontaneous
Prefers elusive, uncertain information
Synthesizing reader
Reliance on images in thinking and
remembering
Prefers drawing and manipulating objects
Prefers open-ended questions
More free with feelings
Good at interpreting body language
Frequently use metaphors
Favors intuitive problem solving
Left and right- brain Characteristics
Learning
Strategies
Avoidance
strategies
Socioaffective
strategies
Cognitive
strategies
Compensatory
strategies
10. PERSONALITY FACTORS
Chapter 6
The
affective
domain
Self-esteem
Inhibition
Risk-taking
Anxiety
Empathy
Extroversion
Myers-Briggs character types
Extroversion Introversion
Sensing Intuition
Thinking Feeling
Judging Perceiving
Motivation: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: intrinsically are ones for which there is no apparent reward except
the activity itself, extrinsically motivation are aimed at bringing about certain internally rewarding consequences,
namely feelings of competence and self-determination.
11. SOCIOCULTURAL FACTORS
Chapter 7
Attitudes: develop early in
childhood and are the result of
parents and peers’ attitudes, of
contact with people who are
different in any number of ways
Second cultural acquisition:
Stage1: a period of excitement and
euphoria over the newness of the
surrounding.
Stage2: cultural shock emerges
Stage3: gradual recovery, cultural
stress
Stage4: assimilation and adaptation
Social distance:
Domination
Integration
Cohesiveness
Congruence
Permanence
World Englishes
English have become the
international languages.
Language policy and politics:
Collectivist societies,
individualist societies
Cultural in the classroom:
Individualism
Power distance
Uncertainty avoidance
Masculinity (cultural opposes
femininity)
ESL and EFL:
Is difficult to determinate when
English is learned as a second
language and when is a foreign
language, because in many
places is accepted and widely
uses language without an official
status.
Language thought and
culture: cultural variables
between language and
thought
12. CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE AND LEARNER LANGUAGE
Chapter 8
The contrastive
analysis hypothesis
The stockpile of
comparative and
contrastive data on a
multitude of pairs of
languages yielded
Markedness and
universal grammar
Markedness theory:
accounted for relative
degrees of difficulty by
means of principles of
universal grammar
Error analysis
human learning is a
process that involves
making of mistakes,
misjudgments and
errors
Universal
grammar:
Language rules
acquired by children
learning their first
language are
presumed to be
universal
Learner language
an approach to
analyzing
interlanguage is to
study the speech and
writing learners
Mistakes and error
two different
phenomena, mistake
(performance error),
error (cannot be self-
corrected)
Cross-linguistic
influence and
learner language
13. Cross-linguistic
influence and
learner language
Sources of error
Interlingual transfer,
Intralingual transfer,
Context of learning,
Communication
strategies
Stages of learner
language
development
Random error stage
Emergent stage
Truly systematic stage Variability in learner
language
According to linguistic context,
According to psychological
processing factors, According
to social context, According to
languages function
Fossilization:
a relative permanent
incorporation of
incorrect linguistic
forms into a person’s
second language
competence
Form focused
instruction
any pedagogical effort
which is used to draw
the learner’s attention
to language form either
implicitly or explicitly
Error treatment
the way teachers deal
with students errors.
14. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
Chapter 9
Communicative competence: aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret
messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts
Language competence
Organizational competence Pragmatic competence
Grammatical
competence
Textual
competence
Illocutionary
competence
Sociolinguistic
competence
-Vocabulary
-Morphology
-Syntax
-Phonology/
graphology
-Cohesion
-Rhetorical
organization
-Ideational functions
-Manipulative functions
-Heuristic functions
-Imaginative functions
-Sensitivity to dialect
or Variety
-Sensitivity to register
-Sensitivity to
naturalness
-Cultura references
and figures of speech
15. Discourse analysis: the analysis between forms and functions of language.
Pragmatics: language comprehension and production
Language and gender: the effect of one’s sex on both production and
reception of language. Difference between the way males and females
speak
Styles and registers: Oratorical, Deliberative, Consultative, Casual,
Intimate
Nonverbal communication: Kinesics, Eye contact, Proxemics, Artifacts,
Kinesthetic, Olfactory dimensions
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