THE EVOLUTIONIST VIEW

USEFUL ELEMENTS OF THEORIES ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING AND ACQUISITION

                                                                                    

     All the ideas, researches and opinions about language acquisition and learning make us reflect as language teachers about how people acquire and learn the native language and others. How I can say that one of those methods is better than another. Taking into account my own experience in the classroom when I teach English, I take elements from different approaches, and I use a variety of techniques to teach the language. I consider that cognition evolves by the time our language is developed, according to the motivation and the exposure we have to the environment.

    Let’s define learning and acquisition: in the first action, we are conscious about language, it is formal; in the second one we are unconscious and it is more informal. Krashen defined these concepts in his Natural Approach, not paying too much attention to the grammar or mistakes learners make but communication, in which he bases his theory. In this proposal, Krashen emphasizes in the affective filter as the clue to involve students’ positive emotions in language acquisition. 

     According to Chomsky, Mind and thought processes are very important. The learner of any language has an inbuilt learning capacity for language that enables learner to construct a kind of personal theory or set of rules about language based on exposure, that is to say that all of us were born with some innate knowledge about a language, which is improved through application and construction over and over again.
    

     At this point I wonder: do human beings acquire the language from nature or do we nurture it? Or both? We recognize sounds, words and simple phrases since we are very young, that is our nature; through time individuals construct, rebuild, create and recreate a language, that is nurture. Skinner, in his behaviorism theory said that human beings learn through stimulus- response and repetition. This is a reliable hypothesis for me because motivation and repetition has had a strong influence in my learning. 

     I believe our experiences have a crucial impact in our language learning. Behaviorists said people learn by imitation and association, that is why we enrich vocabulary, grammar, expressions and sounds everyday; at the same time our brains have that innate capability to acquire the language, having in mind L.A.D proposed by Chomsky.

     Interaction, says Bruner, is an important element for language acquisition. The relationship with the environment, with other people, with situations and events allow us acquire and learn a language, that connection is one of the keys to build and maintain the language in our brains.Piaget takes into account the child’s development in the construction of language. Gardner believes that multiple intelligences must be had in mind by the time we want students learn something easier.

    All these entries made me think about the best method to address my English class, and after reading them, I found that there is no a perfect one. All of them can fit my learners’ abilities, because they have to deal with our condition as human beings, I mean our biological brain development and our emotions intelligence to overcome difficulties. It is a matter of knowledge and physiological evolution. 
As a conclusion, there will be more and more researchers and findings in this field and there will always be a theory or theories that can help language teachers get better results, so our contribution is and will be continue taking care of our profession and giving the best to our students.

  

PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES FROM EACH APPROACH

HOW PRACTICAL WAS MY READING ABOUT ¨MASTER SUCCESSFULLY ANY LANGUAGE OF THE WORLD¨ BY DMITRY SLOMOV

   I know language is a supportive system of our thoughts. As it is described in the reading, language uses conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures and marks that have been built through ages by human beings. The desire of learning a language must connect by questioning ourselves about: Why do I need to learn a language?, how am I going to use the language I learnt?, what am I going to do next?; this way we can have a general framework about what our purposes and goals are, in terms of practical and efficient use of the target language. There could be many reasons why you want to learn a language; you may be interested in studying, living, travel, or just understanding other’s cultures.

     The reading gave me an idea about the principles about language learning: level, practice, words and grammar, memory importance (MNEMONICS) and culture. We must take into account that learning does not mean isolated words, but how to build up sentences and ideas in order to create and recreate situations.

   When I read the book, I realized that most of our students’ problems and mistakes are due to an early negative contact with the language, I mean, teachers whose pronunciation is not good enough, whose grammar structures are not well consolidated to teach beginner levels.  The perfection and performance are determined by good practices in and outside the classroom.

     So patiently I acquired and I am still learning Spanish, of course I am learning English. I was committed in learning it, as well as our learners should be. A little bit of intrinsic motivation and a great deal of extrinsic one. Learning a language implies lots of work and the more you learn, harder it becomes. It is not something about time; it is something that deals with dedication, persistence, discipline and mental energy.

     Finally, I understand that rule number one to master a language is to get a good dictionary, second: read a lot, third: listen to radio, fourth: talk whenever you have the opportunity (even with yourself), fifth: make every word memorable to you. Do not get frustrated or ashamed when making mistakes, we all experience the same process. You will see that you become more fluent by following these advises.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT BEING DEAF OR MUTE?

The Slovak experience…

     The ability of speaking and listening give us some kind of freedom, you can express ideas, feelings, emotions. When I have had diseases where I lose part my hearing or in which I cannot articulate sounds, I have felt impotence, loneliness and sadness, no matter if I understand the language I am exposed to. (At this point I have to clarify that my first language is Spanish and I am having a deeper study of English).

     I am an English school teacher and long time ago two of my students belonged to a Chami ethnical culture and they used to talk in their language, but when they did that, I just walked away; I did not want to act like an ignorant in front of them. For some reason I felt ashamed and frustrated because even with all my studies and language awareness, I could not understand a single word. 

     Recently, I have a little close encounter to the Slovak language, something very excited and ¨terrifying¨. If I have experienced these kind of feelings even knowing my language and having some notions about others, imagine how I felt when my S.L.A professor invited Silvia, the Slovak teacher to give us a 45-minute-class. It made me reflect on how our students feel when we attack them with our English language questions.

     The class before, Professor asked us to look for some useful expressions in Slovak and pay special attention on professions. I think we all had fun that day, everybody in class was saying ¨ahoj: hello in Slovak¨, classmates laughed, repeated and practiced with the help of the internet; at the end of the class, the professor announced that we had fifteen days to get some Slovak notions until Silvia arrived in the class. But the day she came into the classroom and started speaking Slovak like a never ending story, our smiling faces disappeared for a little while and disappointed faces came out.

     I looked everybody around, they were like asking to themselves ¨What?¨ ¨is anybody out there who could help me?¨. Personally I felt deaf, mute, dumb, ridiculous and even more, when Silvia picked me up to perform an activity that I did not how I guessed what I had to do. To be honest I did not have any clue about she was saying to me. In that moment I would have wanted Silvia had repeated and used much more non-verbal communication in order to be understood. There were some structured phrases that most of us already knew, but only by practicing with our partners could understand a little bit. I realized how much I do not know about languages, even though I am a language teacher and at the same time a language student.

     If we as language teachers just stop and think how we are managing our classes, how much  useful and practical our activities are, how motivational they are, and the most important how we address students’ emotions and feelings, our language teaching and learners language  performance could be much more better.   

 

ARE TEACHERS CRAFTSMEN OR SCIENTISTS?

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     People have different ways and techniques for teaching and learning, no matter what you want to learn in order to practice it or teach it. Professions and jobs have certain characteristics that need to be accomplished; they can be learnt by studying or by innate abilities.   In Teaching, teachers have to take into account the transmission of knowledge and the techniques to achieve the goals they want students achieve.

     Discussing these two words with colleagues the conclusion was that teachers have a little bit from both craftsmen and scientists, apart from many others professions’ features; craftsmen and scientists have goals, they want to find better procedures or answers to problems, they want to innovate, to be creative and imaginative and craftsmen and scientists’ main concern is knowledge. 

     According to the meaning of craftsman and teaching relationship we could say that teaching is the art of learning from others, the teachers’ experience and practices become better each time and the results are reflected on students, it has something to deal with heritage and culture, sometimes teachers are selfish with some ‘secrets’ that make the teaching-learning successful, students can get the information implicitly and become better through practice. Scientists and teaching relationship also share many characteristics in which knowledge is the mean objective, most of the time students learn through explicit explanations and the information of the practices are public and objective, there is a free exchange of perceptions, ideas, knowledge, exercises and concepts.

     I think extremes are not good, I consider myself a craftswoman when developing students’ abilities and creativity, when I mold attitudes and improve values. I am a scientist when analyzing behaviors and proposing better practices in the classroom, I can blend both concepts and obtain a well done performance from the students. We need to teach our students the WHATs, HOWs, WHYs and if it is possible and convenient any other information we can add.

QUESTION RESEARCH

ARE LEFT HANDED STUDENTS MORE CAPABLE OF LEARNING ENGLISH THAN THOSE RIGHT HANDED STUDENTS?

HOW APPLIED LINGUISTICS HELP YOU TO BECOME A BETTER PROFESSIONAL?

You can change the world by changing your words. Remember death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Joel Osteen

     Applied linguistics has different concepts related to the art of constructing a language and the ways people can use it to different purposes. It focuses on several ideas that have concerns about how individuals give and receive information in a structured system.

     Applied linguistics makes us think about how we teach a language and how practical and functional a language is in terms of an effective and efficient communication. According to this, applied linguistics helps us to adjust and provide elements to study the language in several aspects such us:  grammar, syntax, morphology, etymology, semantics phonetics, understanding, functions and practicality.

    That is why we as professionals of language teaching first think about the value of our work and how we are directly influenced by good understanding of the language in order to teach it correctly. Professional education language teaching cannot work isolated from the realities students have. I believe language teachers must develop processes taking into account students’ needs, context, how language is connected to background, emotional and cognitive characteristics, activities, contents, assessment. There is an evident need to improve the conditions we give to them to acquire and learn. A practical input will be the difference between meaningful or meaningless learning.

THE ROLE OF LINGUISTICS AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Language learning is a complex emotional, social and cognitive process.

T.D.I (Teacher Development Interactive)

Online course
Hunter College of New York

     

     A Language is composed by grammar (rules), vocabulary (words), pronunciation (sounds) and meaning (context); the What, How, Why, When and Where are the ways we adapt those structures of the language and its organization to become the daily basis of communication development. Teachers are demanded to explain language construction and functions as the most important part of teaching a second language, but sometimes they forget to contextualize it, (how students will make profit from it in their productive lives). Most our public school students still do not recognize how useful learning a language is and how those processes will make the brain work more efficiently. 

     The time we have to spend on studying the language will have to have a direct relationship with the students we have, the level and context they are in.  Teaching a second language is not an easy task, students are taught new structures, combination of words, meanings, etc. It is like starting again with unknown dispositions of a new language that involves feelings, interactions and systematic brain processes.

    Today’s world needs us to be competent in language communication to political, economic, social, cultural and academic purposes. We need to be able to adapt to world’s needs, not on the contrary. Students also have to overcome all the exigencies that are required to be successful at studying and working.

    Through history researches and teachers have experimented approaches (proposals, approximations), methodologies (organizing systems), methods (a way of doing or solving something), strategies (plan of action to achieve a goal) and theories (scientific principles to explain phenomena) of language teaching and learning. All of them with the unique objective of answering how our brain can learn the linguistics and what the best ways to do it are. How we recognize sounds, how we reproduce them, read and write them. These points of views and practices are composed by experiences, old and new concepts, tendencies, processes and technology.  

     At schools students just have the English class because the curriculum of the school demands it to take the subject, others need it for specific and academic purposes, and some because they like it and it is easy for them to learn it, so it becomes a general English learning. The motivation and purposes students have for learning a second language have a negative or positive effect on the way they acquire it. We as teachers hope our students have a control on their language acquisition; the role of the teacher has changed, they now are guides and students the center of the classes.

     People learn the first language at home and usually in the country where the target language is spoken; on the contrary a second language is most of the time learnt on a different environment where a different language is spoken. That is why when teaching a second language we have to have in mind psychological factors such us: personality type, learning style, self-esteem, risk taking and language awareness.

(Language) learning is not just about abilities, capabilities, competences and skill-development, but it is also about willingness and opportunities to use and apply it successfully.

An induction to TESOL methods

                                                                               Oscar Molina Márquez

     A second language acquisition theory attempts to understand how we learn a language and describes that learning processes and the linguistics appropriation.

    According to Krashen’s theory it is very important the affective filter at the moment of language teaching and  learning. We have to take into account the differences in language learning: Children’s learning is inductive, they have much more tolerance, their ego may be not very strong, limited ability to understand abstract concepts, they have little self awareness, they may experience some interference in early stages of L2 acquisition, seem not to retain accent before puberty. That is why children need to see, touch, draw, talk, sing, move; they are creating a new linguistic system in their brains, they are decoding sounds, words and sentences from the language they are learning.

     Second language acquisition is usually acquire in adolescence or adulthood, it does not have a lot of input, there is less praise and less individual attention, it is deductive, there is low tolerance, they have the ability to understand abstract concepts, they can be frustrated easier, they have much more awareness about the world, adults knowledge of L1 may facilitate foreign language learning.  Adults need to know rules and how grammar works.

     When we teach a new linguistic system, it is good to establish the differences among our learners. We know children’s attention span is very short, their attention is scattered, they are less embarrassed, and they like to have lots of T.P.R (James Asher) activities as well as participation activities. Adults’ attention span is long, their attention is focused, they embarrassed easier, they like explicit instruction, and they do not like to participate unless they are sure about their contribution.

     For us the role of being teaching a language demands we build confidence in our students, let them work in a collaborative environment, low their anxiety level, encourage and motivate them, start from the easy to difficult, give them chances to make mistakes in order to be aware of language usage and do practical lessons. All these implies that besides of teaching grammar structures we must teach some cultural aspects in order to make a positive acculturation process that establishes a connection between language and social aspects of the community, having the possibility to have successfully communication with social, cultural and pragmatic knowledge of the language.

The notion that attitudes and motivation would be implicated in second language acquisition is not a new one. In 1941, Mary Jordan investigated the relationship between attitudes toward a number of school subjects and grades in those subjects, and found the relationships for French to be among the highest. A number of later studies by other researches also showed relationships between attitudes towards learning languages and proficiency in the language (see Gardner 1985 for a review). The first reference to a possible relationship between attitudes toward the other language community and achievement in that language, however, appears to have been made by Arsenian (1945). One of the many relevant questions he raised, for example, was, “In what way do affective factors, such as social prestige, assumed superiority, or—contrariwise—assumed inferiority, or enforcement of a language by a hated nation affect language learning in a child?” (Arsenian 1945:85).

RC Gardner - Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 1988 - Cambridge Univ. Press

    

     The issue is that teachers result much more easier to teach grammar rules and structure than to teach a communicative competence, something that requires time, well done and prepared activities, group work, lots of input, individual review. This process needs to be enhance by using better practices, and bet for changing the traditional English class into an experienced and practical class. This means paying attention on students’ needs, environment, context, group size, resources, and the ideas of Allen Ascher about language and social interaction.

Our foreign language teaching must have several aspects to have in consideration, students need to interact in order to learn the target language, as well as learn grammar and vocabulary. All that combined in order to have a good performance in linguistic and communicative competences.

     We can not forget how important is to recognize the inside class practices and the outside ones, students have the possibility to learn in both environments. The classroom mostly becomes a formal way to learn, and the context outside becomes the informal and natural way one. Those are important in the language acquisition process and they are considered relevant issues of a foreign language.

While some studies indicate that students can efficiently utilize informal linguistic environments for second language acquisition, other studies suggest that the classroom is of greater benefit. This conflict is resolved in three ways. Evidence is presented to support the hypothesis that informal and formal environments contribute to different aspects of second language competence, the former affecting acquired competence and the latter affecting learned competence. Second, a distinction must be made between informal environments in which active language use occurs regularly and those in which language use is irregular. Finally, data is presented that suggests that the classroom can be used simultaneously as a formal and informal linguistic environment, a result that is consistent with reports of success with language teaching systems that emphasize active language use in a classroom.

SD Krashen - Tesol Quarterly, 1976 – JSTOR

THE RECIPE FOR LEARNING

Jon McClelland, Harvard Psychologist, has stated that the three ingredients to successful learning are:  Wanting to learn, knowing how to learn, and Having a chance to learn.

   

    Learning is the acquisition of a new behavior through the desire to obtain what a person wants when he/she needs to create, to analyze, to solve, to improve. It is the ability everybody wants to develop to do an activity, a way to control and manage emotions. It is also the adaptation to live in society, to create new thoughts. Learning is the way people act and react facing adequately the daily life events. Knowledge is part of life, people need to learn in order to grow and vice versa.

    

     There is a connection between goals and learning, goals make people want to learn. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has a strong power and emotional impact in learning. I always wanted to learn English, I wondered how people could understand other languages, I found and I still find it fascinating. That intrinsic motivation made me study English.

     If a person likes and enjoys doing certain activities, it is easier for him/her learn it. It is also important to take into account the concepts and activities that work best for each individual. Motivation and interests are crucial to focus all attention in acquiring information. The understanding of these cognitive processes has given answers to the creativity and memory problems.

    The time of learning starts when the person interacts in different situations, all those needs of environment make people choose what the best way to acquire knowledge is. Knowing How to learn really gives a person the right clues and tools to make that learning meaningful, theory described by Paul David Ausubul, where he describes learning through relationships a person has from before. Learning by doing, through practice, repetition, in order to do it better each time. What people want to do and how they adapt their behavior to different situations make them efficient by improving learning styles. 

    Finally we can conclude that all learn differently, it can be through stimulus and responses, through transference from a generation to another, through searching, through trial and error, etc. We have the same opportunities to learn, and everyday people have a chance to learn. According to Piaget’s theory a child does not need to go to a school to learn how to eat correctly or to say mom or dad; he/she does it at home, from the environment, not always conscious about that. He/she just observes people around and imitated what they do or say, it is not a hard task. We learn things everyday and they are not necessarily taught by teachers, we learn to face daily life, we learn ways to interact with other people, we learn from things we are repeating everyday , it is part of our development and evolution as human beings.