jueves, 7 de abril de 2011

First language acquisition

George Yule.

First language acquisition is the language that children acquire in their first years of life, children acquire language without overt instruction it is an innate predisposition in the children, even though this isn´t enough, we can say that this is called language faculty, the fact that every human being is endowed with language.



Basic requirements
-          Interactions with other language users, children must to hear language and that way reproduce language.
-          The exposure to the language.
-          The cultural transmission, which means that language is, acquired in particular language – using environment, it is not genetically transmitted.
-          The crucial requirement appears to be the opportunity to interact with others via language.

The acquisition schedule
At the same time that motor skills like walking, sitting, using the hands among others physical activities are developed children develop language, their mother tongue.
Language acquisition depends on the interplay with social factors in the child´s environment.
Children have a natural capacity to identify some aspects of linguistic input during their early years of life, this acquisition capacity need a constant exposure to the language where the children will be actively practicing language, and then prove it when they speak.

Some controversies
Language will vary from culture to culture, because of the milieu where the child is expose for the first time.
Noam Chomsky proposed that language development should be described as language growth, because language can be considered as an organ that develops just like another human organ.
Children´s speech as a whole single unit without considering morphology or syntax.

Caretaker speech
Children are helped by the adults that surround their environment on their language acquisition; this is given for the typical behavior of adults in the environment, adults that spend the most part of their time with children, the mother, father or grandparents, among others. The characteristic of caretaker speech is that is a simplified speech style adopted by the caretaker, who interacts with a child.
The caretaker speech is characterized by simple structures and a lot of repetition, if the child is indeed in this process of working out a system of putting words and sounds together, then the child will be internalized with language.



Language´ stages

Stages
Ages
Explanation
Pre-language stages
Three months to ten months


By six months




Around nine months

Eleventh months
Cooing: the first recognizable sounds.  This are velar sounds  (k) and (g) and usually high vowels: (i) and (u)

Babbling:  the child is able to produce a number of different vowels and consonants such as fricatives and nasals, sounds like mu and da.

Babbling: Intonation patters


Babbling: The infant child made use of vocalizations to express emotions and emphasis. A late babbling is characterized by imitations too.

The one word or holophrastic stage
Twelve and eighteen months
A single form or unit, function as a phrase or sentence. Production of single unit utterances.

The two-word stage
Eighteen to twenty months
The child´s vocabulary now is beyond fifty words. The combinations of words that the child forms, will be interpret in different ways by the caretaker, depending on the context of the situation. The child only intend communicate expression, but the caretaker is concerned with grammar.
The child produce an utterance and receives a  feedback, which one means that the utterance worked.

Telegraphic speech
Two and three years old

By the age of two and a half

Three years old
This stage is characterized by strings of lexical morphemes in phrases such as cat drink milk.

Child´s vocabulary is expanding rapidly.


The child´s vocabulary resembles at the vocabulary of an adult.




The acquisition process
When the child is actively constructing forms in the process of acquisition of language, the child is being taught and tested, that way the child will have a better notion of language and develop it correctly.
The use of sounds and word combinations are important either  in the practice and interaction with the language.

Morphology (word – formation)
  • Inflectional morphemes: -ing and –s
  • Overgeneralization process: is the widespread application of grammatical forms.

-          Plurals: e.g. foot – foots or footses instead of feet.
-          The use of irregular plural
-          Possessive inflections
-          The use of past-tense morphemes ‘ed’ in the majority of verbs and words. E.g. go, goed, instead of went.

Syntax (word order)
Syntax is against the imitation because the child not only repeat utterances, the child has his own way of expressing things.

Formation of questions and negation:

Stages
Questions
Negation
1st stage
The use of rise intonation in Wh- questions.

The use of no or not is much more common.
2nd stage
Intonation rise continues. The use of Wh- questions is more constant, now there are complex expressions.
The use of no and not plus auxiliaries, like do and can, which are placed in front of the verb.

3rd stage
The inversion of subject and verb appears.
The use other auxiliary forms like didn´t and won´t, then a late acquisition of isn´t.




Semantics (the meaning of words)
The meaning of words is stuck and is difficult to know what the child really wants to express.
Overextension: when the child uses the name of an object for all the objects with the same characteristic, e.g. ball, for all rounded objects.
Hyponymy: the generalization of a term, to describe other terms.

First language acquisition

Chapter II H. D. Brown

In this chapter we are going to talk about a first language acquisition which is a complex process and system of communication, the one that researchers are trying to discover how it works and acquire it.


Theories of first language acquisition

§  Behavioristic Approaches
Language is consider a human behavior where the Behavioristic approach is focus on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior – the observable responses – and the relationships between those responses, language behavior as the production of correct responses to stimuli. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response. If the response is reinforced we can say that is conditioned. (Language is a set of habits acquired by a process of conditioning)

-          Verbal behavior: (B. F. Skinner, 1957) refers to conditioning in which the human being emits a response or operant, a sentence without stimuli, that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement.

-          Mediation theory: meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus (a word or a sentence) elicits a mediating response that is self stimulating.

§  The nativist approach
Language acquisition is innately (genetically) determined, and human beings are therefore predisposed to a systematic perception of language.
-          Language acquisition device: an innate, metaphorical “mechanism” in young children’s brain that predisposes them to acquire language.(human capacity to acquire language)
-          Universal grammar: what children bring through the environment to their language when they are speaking, regarding grammar.
-          Pivot grammar: the early grammars of child language.
-          Parallel distributed processing or connectionism: the receiving, storing, or recalling of information at several levels of attention simultaneously.

§  Functional approach
Social, linguistic, biological factors affect language acquisition, and these factors are mutually dependent upon, interact with, and modify one another.

-          Cognition language developments: Language developments of children depend on the cognitive underpinnings of language what children know will determine what they learn about the code for speaking and understanding of language.

-          Social interaction and language development: Language depends on cognitive thought and memory structure, the interaction between the child´s language acquisition and the learning of how social systems operate in human behavior.

Issues in first language acquisition

Competence and Performance
Competence is the non-observable knowledge or the ability to do something, and when we show or perform what we know, through the spoken or written language is what we called performance, the overtly observable and concrete manifestation of competence, competence is the rules of grammar, vocabulary, all pieces and how they fit.




Comprehension and Production
All aspects of linguistic comprehension precede, or facilitate, linguistic production. There is a general superiority of comprehension over production: children seem to understand “more” than they actually produce.

Nature or Nurture?
Nativists contend that a child is born with an innate knowledge of or predisposition toward language, and that this innate property is universal in all human beings.
Derek Bickerton proposed that human beings are “bioprogrammed” to proceed from stage to stage.

LAD    -------->     Nature = innate
Conditioning    ------>    behaviour   -------->  nurture = environmental provided

Universals
Language is universally acquired in the same manner, and moreover, that the deep structure of language at its deepest level may be common to all languages.

Sistematicity and Variability
Children exhibit a remarkable ability to infer the phonological, structural, lexical, and semantic system of language.
Researchers do not agree on how to define various “stages” of language acquisition. Certain “typical” patterns appear in child language.

Language and thought


Language is dependent upon and springs from cognitive development, which is claim that is at the very center of human organism. (Piaget, 1972)
The influence of language on cognitive development. (Bruner, Olver, & Greenfield 1996)
Thought and language were seen as two distinct cognitive operations that grow together. (Schinke-Llano, 1993)
Language is a way of life which interacts simultaneously with thought and feelings, we have to discover how language can affects thought and how thought affects language.

Imitation
It is one of the important strategies a child uses in the acquisition of language. The first type is surface – structure imitation, where a person repeats or mimics the surface strings, attending to a phonological code rather than a semantic code. The second type is a deep structure imitation, children forget surface imitation and concentrate in the feelings that they want to express forgetting grammar.
 


Practice
Children practice language constantly, especially in the early stage of single – word and two – word utterances. There is evidence that certain very frequent forms are acquired first: what questions, irregular past tense, forms, certain common household items and persons.

Input
Adult input seems to shape the child’s acquisition, and the interaction patterns between child and parent change according to the increasing language skills of the child.

Discourse analysis or conversational
Interaction, rather than exposure, is required; children do not learn language from overhearing the conversations of others, and must, instead, acquire it in the context of being spoken to.

First language acquisition insights applied to language teaching.
“Direct method” of Berlitz consists in the second language learning should be more like first language learning: lots of active oral interaction, spontaneous use of the language, no translation between first and second language, and little or no analysis of grammatical rules.


Language, Learning and Teaching

Chapter I H. D. Brown

What is a permanent struggle in teaching/learning?

The permanent struggle in teaching/learning is that you can´t separate the definition or the concept of teaching from learning, they go together, and if you are going to learn a second language you have to go beyond the knowledge of your 1st language you have to get into a new culture, a new way of thinking, feeling and acting.

Are we equipped with a do-it-yourself-kit to acquire languages?

We are not equipped with a do-it-yourself-kit, there are a lot of variables in the acquisition of a new language, you will need total commitment, intellectual, physical and emotional response to successfully receive and send messages in a second language.

Why do people learn or fail to learn a language?

We can consider this quest as eclectic and cautious because, there is no single theory or hypothesis, that provides a formula for all the learners in all the contexts and eclectic because you will have to be critical as you consider the merit of various models and theories and research findings about learning.



Name the issues to consider in second language acquisition

Some of the issues that are considering in SLA may be initially approach as a multitude of questions that are ask about this complex process.
Questions about: Learner characteristics, linguistic factors, learning processes, age and acquisition, instructional variables, context and purpose.

What are the motivations to learn a language?

Some of the motivations to learn a language will depend on the learner´s characteristics, either the age, the context, the purpose, the reasons will depend in particularly of each person everyone has different reasons some are just trying to improve their knowledge and other want to learn about the culture that involve a language or just because is a requirement.

What is a PARADIGM?

A model of something, a very clear and typical example of something, a theory, in the case of a second language acquisition.




Give 3 definitions for LANGUAGE

There is no exact definition for language and this will depend on the lexicographer the one who´s trying to define it. In general terms we can say that language is:

§  Language is systematic
§  Language is a set of arbitrary symbols. Those symbols are primarily vocal, but also    visual.
§  The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
§  Language is used for communication.
§  Language operates in a speech community or culture.
§  Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited humans.
§  Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; language and language learning both have universal characteristics.

Some possible areas where language can be defined too are the area of phonetics phonology, syntactic, lexical and semantic analysis psycholinguistics, between others. You understanding of the component of language determine to a large extent how you teach language.

What is the relation between language and cognition?

The relation between language and cognition is that when you´re attempting to learn a language you store in your brain information about a language and all the factors that involves it, like the culture, the grammar rules, etc. the relation is to know about a language.
The relation between language and cognition is that language is dependent upon cognitive development.

Which are some LEARNING definitions?

Some definitions of learning are: “Learning is acquiring or getting of knowledge of a subject or a skill by study, experience, or instruction.”
“Learning as a change in an individual caused by experience” (Slavin, 2003, p. 138)
§  Learning is acquisition or “ getting”
§  Learning is retention of information or skill
§  Retention implies storage systems, memory, and cognitive organization.
§  Learning involves active, conscious focus on and acting upon events outside or inside the organism
§  Learning is relatively permanent  but subject to forgetting
§  Learning involves some form of practice, perhaps reinforced practice
§  Learning is a change in behavior.






Can we define TEACHING apart from learning?

We cannot define teaching apart from learning because teaching is guiding and facilitating learning, enabling the learner, setting the conditions for learning. (the teaching process as the facilitation of learning)

What is the importance of our PEDAGOGICAL PHILOSPHY?

Teaching can be a very complex activity where you objective is that the learner be able to understand and learn a second language, your understanding of how the learner learns will determine you philosophy of education, you teaching style, methods and classroom techniques with this resources you have to be able to teach of an appropriate way.

Refer to the 3 schools of thought in SLA

Three schools of thought in SLA:
a.        Structural Linguistics and Behavioral Psychology (Early 1900s and 1940s and 1950s)
b.       Generative Linguistics and Cognitive Psychology (1960s, 1970s and 1980s)
c.        Constructivism (1980s, 1990s and 2000s)

Describe the GTM

GTM: Grammar Translation Method is a language teaching method in which the central focus is on grammatical rules, paradigms, and vocabulary memorization as the basis for translating from one language to another.