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