FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

WEEK 1

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Definition of Language1. Language is systematic2. Language is a set of arbitrary symbols3. Those symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual4. The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they differ5. Language is used for communication6. Language operates in a speech community or culture7. Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to

humans8. Language is acquired by all people in much the same way;

language and language learning both have universal characteristics.

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INTRODUCTION• "What theory implies, quite simply, is that language

acquisition, first or second, occurs when comprehension of real messages occurs, and when the acquirer is not 'on the defensive'...

• Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill. It does not occur overnight, however. Real language acquisition develops slowly, and speaking skills emerge significantly later than listening skills, even when conditions are perfect.

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• The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear.

• These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production.

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• The first language is the language a person is most comfortable with in communication.

• This may be the first language he or she required but need not be so.

• For example, many non-Malay children in Malaysia may have acquired their mother tongue first and be most proficient in it at the point of entry into school.

• But after several years of Malay medium education, they may regard Bahasa Melayu as their first language, although it may not be the language they acquired first.

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The Relationship of Theory to Practice• In deciding how to develop language teaching methods andmaterials, one can take three approaches:

1. make use of second language acquisition theory, 2. make use of applied linguistics research, and 3. make use of ideas and intuition from experience.

• These approaches should in fact support each other and lead to common conclusions.

• While "most current theory may still not be the final word on second language acquisition," it is hoped that teachers will use the ideas in books as another source alongside of their classroom and language-learning experiences.

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• We know what is involved in the process of language learning but unfortunately we do not know exactly how a person learns a language.

• Even so, in order to make efforts to language teaching and learning effective, we have to base our classroom practice on sound theories of learning.

• Certain theories from the field of psychology, sociology and linguistics have had a profound effect upon what we do in the language classroom.

• There are some major theories that had impact on language learning

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Behaviourist• In early 20th century• Pavlov, Watson and Thorndike believe that it is possible to

predict and explain the way people learn by studying the behaviour of animals.

• They believed that it is possible to train an animal to behave in any desired manner by using a learning model which consists of a stimulus, response and reinforcement.

• In a classic experiment to support the behaviorist theory, a rat was used.

Stimulus- light Response – rats goes up Stimulus - food

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• The bond between stimulus and the response is strengthened by positive reinforcement.

• Sequence repeated a number of times.• Repetition is important to bring about habit

formation and learning.• Skinner applied stimulus-response reinforcement

theory to the way human acquire language.• He views language as a form of behaviour and

language learning as a process of habit formation.• Skinner placed great importance on reinforcement/

reward – a smile, a nod, praises

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• Skinner showed that reinforcement is very important in early stages of learning, and should be given frequently.

• Each step in the learning process should be as small as possible so that correct behaviour is reinforced with rewards and mistakes are corrected immediately.

• The behaviorist theory of learning provided teachers with a set of principles and easy to implement classroom procedures.

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CONSTRUCTIVISM• Constructivists argued that all human beings construct their

own version of reality and therefore multiple constrasting ways of knowing and describing are equally legitimate.

• Emphasis on the primacy of each individual’s construction of reality

• Constructivist perspectives are demonstrated through studies of conversational discourse, sociocultural factors in learning and interactionist theories

• Constructivists perspectives are a natural successor to cognitivist studies of universal grammar, information processing, memory, artificial intelligence and interlanguage systematicity

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.....Constructivism• All three positions are seen as important in creating

balanced descriptions of human linguistic behavior.

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NATIVIST Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the

most influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

He has made a number of strong claims about language : in particular, he suggests that language is an innate faculty - that is to say that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. The universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. 13

If a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the evidence that there was only one language, with a number of local variants. Chomsky gives a number of reasons why this should be so. Among the most important of these reasons is the ease with which children acquire their mother tongue

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• He claims that it would be little short of a miracle if children learnt their language in the same way that they learn mathematics or how to ride a bicycle. This, he says, is because :

• Children are exposed to very little correctly formed language. When people speak, they constantly interrupt themselves, change their minds, make slips of the tongue and so on. Yet children manage to learn their language all the same.

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• Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it, which they can then use to produce sentences that they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviourists believe, but a grammar that generates an infinity of new sentences.

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• Children are born, then, with the Universal Grammar wired into their brains. This grammar offers a certain limited number of possibilities - for example, over the word order of a typical sentence.

• Some languages have a basic SVO structure

• The teacher/ gave / a lecture S V O

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• When the child begins to listen to his parents, he will unconsciously recognise which kind of a language he is dealing with - and he will set his grammar to the correct one - this is known as 'setting the parameters'.

• It is as if the child were offered at birth a certain number of hypotheses, which he or she then matches with what is happening around him.

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• He knows intuitively that there are some words that behave like verbs, and others like nouns, and that there is a limited set of possibilities as to their ordering within the phrase.

• This is not information that he is taught directly by the adults that surround him, but information that is given.

• This set of language learning tools, provided at birth, is referred to by Chomsky as the Language Acquisition Device .

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• How did you learn to speak your native language? • We often ask questions such as, do you remember

when did you learned to tie your shoes, ride a bike, and eat with a fork. Sometimes we can remember because a parent helped us learn how to do these things. Now, since we always speak the language of our parents, they must have helped us learn to speak our first language.

• But do you remember when your mother taught you the past tense? When your father laid down the rules for passive sentences? We don't remember these important moments of our childhood because they never occurred.

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• Our parents didn't teach us how to walk and they didn't teach us how to talk. Yet we learned from them.

• How can this be? Certainly there must have been a subtle, perhaps intuitive teaching process that neither our parents nor we were aware of.

• We begin by imitating what we hear our parents say as best we can, repeating random phrases.

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• Our parents in subtle ways punish us for the childish speech errors we make (by not responding, correcting the error, etc.) and reward correct phrases (by responding positively). As our speech improves, our parents respond more positively and less negatively.

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• First, let's examine the assumption that children begin speaking by trying to repeat what they have heard their parents say. Have you ever heard a child say things like this:

• 1a Daddy go• 1b He hitted me• 1c No eat cake

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• Who did they hear utter such phrases? Daddy go is an attempt to express 'Daddy is going'. • But if the child were merely trying to

repeat this common phrase, choosing random two-word combinations, he or she would also occasionally say Daddy is or simply is going? Yet these two phrases do not occur as normal speech errors of children while Daddy go is a common one.

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• Second, research shows that while mothers often respond to the semantic content of what their children say ('No, that's not a doggie, it's a cow'), they very rarely respond to the grammatical status of their children's phrases.

• Indeed, when parents do respond to speech errors, they most often respond positively.

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FUNCTIONAL

• Functions are the meaningful, interactive purposes , within a social (pragmatic) context, that we accomplish with the forms.

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• Language acquisition is learning how to express meanings acquiring the functions one can perform with human language.

• This perspective, of course, subordinates the acquisition of linguistic structure, recognizing the learners can express meanings using a variety of analyzed and unanalyzed pieces of the lexicogrammar.

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• As language is defined as a systematic resource, the organizing principle in linguistic description is system (rather than structure). Since language is viewed as semiotic potential, the description of language is a description of choice.

• Systemic linguists chart their analyses by diagraming the choices language users can make in a given setting to realize a particular linguistic product.

• The available choices depend on aspects of the context in which the language is being used. Choices can be charted on different levels, or strata, of language.

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SIMILARITIES & DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 1st AND 2nd LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

• According to some researchers, the defining difference between a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) is the age at which the language was learned.

• For example, linguist Eric Lenneberg used second language to mean a language consciously acquired or used by its speaker after puberty. In most cases, people never achieve the same level of fluency and comprehension in their second languages as in their first language. These views are closely associated with the Critical Period Hypothesis.

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• A great deal of what is called 'Communicative Language Teaching' is based on what is essentially a 'nativist' view of second language (L2) acquisition.

• A 'nativist' view assumes – consciously or unconsciously – that somehow L2 learning can and should be like learning our native language (L1).

• This is wishful thinking and is based on a profound misconception about the nature of L2 learning - just as it is a misconception about how L1 acquisition occurs.

• The best way to explore the differences between the two processes is to view them side-by-side – in parallel, as below.

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L1 ACQUISITION• L1 acquisition is genetically triggered at the most

critical stage of the child's cognitive development. • The 'engine' of language – its syntactic system – is

'informationally encapsulated' – which means that children are not even aware of developing a complex, rule-governed, hierarchical system. Most L1 speakers do not even realise this is what they are using.

• The L1 is typically acquired at the crucial period of cognitive development; pre-puberty, when L1 and other crucial life-skills are also acquired or learned.

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• Children never resist L1 acquisition, any more than they resist learning to walk.

• Given even minimal 'input' during critical pre-pubescent development, all humans acquire the L1 of the society or social group they are born into as a natural and essential part of their lives.

• Even brain-damaged and/or retarded children usually acquire the full grammatical code of the language of their society or social group.

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• In short, L1 acquisition is an essential, biologically–driven process. It is part of every individual's evolutionary history and development in the most critical stage of that individual's acquisition of essential life-skills.

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L2 LEARNING• L2 learning is not genetically triggered in any way unless

the child grows up bi-lingually (in which case, it is not really L2 learning at all).

• The syntax of the L2 is not acquired unconsciously , or at least not in the way L1 syntax is acquired. Few L2 learners develop the same degree of unconscious, rule-governed insight into and use of the L2 which they demonstrate with the L1.

• The L2 is not learned as part of the learner's general cognitive development. It is not an essential life-skill in the same way that the L1 is.

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• There is often great conscious or unconscious resistance to L2 learning.

• Many highly intelligent individuals with impressive learning skills often have great problems learning an L2.

• Many L2 learners 'fossilise' at some stage, so that even if they use the L2 regularly, and are constantly exposed to input in it, they fail to develop full grammatical or 'generative' competence.

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• L2 learning is not a biologically-driven process. It is not an essential aspect of an individual's general development. especially when the L2 is simply another subject on an already overloaded school curriculum or something that has to be undertaken by people with busy lives and heavy work-loads.

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SLA

• Refer to H. Douglas Brown, pg 8 -13• Theories on second language acquisition - structuralism - rationalism - cognitive psychology - constructivism

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