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There is a variety of different language teaching approaches, methods, and materials that may influence the practices of language teachers.
How to evaluate (and adapt) these approaches according to
language learning in early childhood
Second language research and second language teaching have been influenced by changes in the understanding of how children acquire their first language.
theories that have been trying to explain second language acquisition/learning
how individual characteristics of the learners affect their success
second learners' developing knowledge and their ability to use it
a comparison of natural and instructional environments for second language learning
proposals for second language teaching and researches, leading to a discussion of the evidence available for assessing their effectiveness
discussion of what research findings suggest about the most effective ways to teach and learn a second language
High degree of similarity in the early language of children all over the world.
The involuntary crying babies do to indicate they are hungry or uncomfortable or the cooing and gurgling sounds of contented babies.
Most babies understant quite a few frequently repeated words and are able to respond to some of them:
Children are able to produce something about 50 different words and begin to combine some of them in very simple sentences.
TELEGRAPHIC LANGUAGE
'Mommy juice.'
'Baby fall down.'
The word order of a baby's telegraph language reflects the same word order as adult language. The combined words have a meaning and a relationship that makes them more than a words list. The tow or three-words sentences signs that children are able to combine them creatively.
'Kiss baby'
'Baby kiss'
Stages in language acquisition are related to children's cognitive development.
Children do not use temporal adverbs (tomorrow, last week) until they develop some understanding about time.
Children are shown drawings of imaginary creatures with novel names of people performing mysterious actions.
Children learn the functions of negation very early. They may express this with words and gestures. But it may get some time until they can express this in sentences using the appropriate words/word order.
Negation uses the word NO.
No!
No cookie.
No comb hair.
Daddy no comb hair.
Don't touch that!
I can't do it.
He don't want it.
The use of the correct form of auxiliary verbs according to person and tense.
Children may have some difficulties with other features of negative sentences, sucu as double negative.
You didn't have supper.
She doesn't want it.
I don't have no more candies.
There is a predictable order in which the wh- words emerge.
WHAT
WHERE and WHO
WHY
HOW and WHEN
Single words or two- or three-word sentences with rising intonation.
Cookie?
Mummy book?
Word order of declarative sentences with rising intonation.
You like this?
I have some?
Children gradually notice that questions have a different structure.
Can I go?
Are you happy?
The children's rule is that questions are formed by putting an auxiliary verb or question word at the 'front' of a sentence, leaving the rest in its statement form:
Is the teddy bear is tired?
Do I can have a cookie?
Why you don't have one?
Why you catched it?
Questions formed by subject-auxiliary inversion.
More variety in the auxiliaries that appear before the subject.
Are you going to play with me?
Do dogs like icecream?
Wh- and yes/no questions are formed correctly.
Negative questions a bit difficult.
Are these your boots?
Why did you do that?
Does Daddy have a box?
Why the thedy bear can't go outside?
All question types correctly formed, including negative and more complex questions.
This developmental process does not follow an uninterrupted path. Children may fall back on older patters as they learn new things.
By the age of 4, most children are able to ask questions, give commands, report real events, and create stories using correct word order and grammatical markers most of the time.
Children now try to develop their abilities to use the language they have acquired in a widening social environment.
Children began to understand that people they often talk to on the telephone cannot see what they see.
Children use this language to defend their toys in the playground.
Children see the difference between how adults talk to babies and how they talk to each other, and begin using different voices in elaborate pretend play, practicing and exploring these voices.
Children develop the ability to treat language as an object separate from the meaning it conveys.
'drink the chair'
'cake the eat'
The school setting will require new ways of using language and bring new opportunities to develop it.
Children also develop more sophisticated metalinguistic awareness, and learning how to read is a booster for this process.
Metalinguistic awareness permits children to discover that words can have multiple meanings. Then, they gain access to jokes, tricky questions, and riddles.
Vocabulary grows at a rate between several hundreds and more than one thousand words a year, coming mainly from reading for assignments or for pleasure.
Peter
Lois
Peter
Patsy
peter
Lois
Peter
Get more
You're gonna put more wheels in the dump truck?
Dump truck. Wheels. Dump truck.
What happened to it (the truck)?
(looking under chair for it) Lose it. Dump truck! Dump truck! Fall! Fall!
Yes, the dump truck fell down.
Dump truck fell down. Dump truck.
Peter (24 months) repeats 30-40% of what he hears from others, but this imitation is not random. He imitates words or/and sentences structures that are new for him and stops saying them when they become solidly grounded in his language system.
That shows that children select what they are going to imitate. More than that, they seem to imitate what is new to them, not just what is available.
Cindy
Patsy
Cindy
Patsy
Cindy
Patsy
Cindy
Cindy
Cindy
Patsy
Kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo? kawo?
What are the rabbits eating?
They are eating... kando?
No, that's a carrot.
Carrot. (point to each carrot on the page) The other carrot. The other carrot. The other carrot.
A few minutes later, Cindy brings Patsy a stuffed toy rabbit.
What does the rabbit like to eat?
(incomprehensible) eat the carrots.
Cindy gets another stuffed rabbit.
He (incomprehensible) eat the carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots.
One week later, Cindy opens the book to the same page.
Here's the carrots. (pointing) is that a carrot?
Yes
Cindy remembers a week later and return right to the page of the lesson. Like Peter, her imitations is focused on what she is currently working on.
Though the examples of Peter and Cindy give some support to the behaviourist theory, their choice of what to imitate is determined by something inside them rather than by the environment itself.
Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.
Why? So he can doc my little bump?
Mother
Randall
Randall form the verb 'doc' from the noun 'doctor', by analogy with
farmers who farm
swimmers who swim
actors who act
You took all the towels away because I can't dry my hands.
Children tend to mention events in the order that they occur.
The towels were taken away.
Randall couldn't try his hands.
Noam Chomsky suggests that language is acquired because
Children come to know more about language structures than they could actually learn by the samples of language they hear.
Children are exposed to incomplete sentences, grammatical errors, and other variations, but they know how to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences.
Children are born with the innate ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples they are exposed to.
All human languages lie in some kind of common template.
a. John saw himself.
b. Himself saw John.*
In (a) and (b) it looks as the reflexive pronoum must follow the noun it refers to. But
c. Looking after himself bores John.
d. John said that Fred liked himself.
e. John said that Fred liked himself. *
f. John told Bill to wash himself.
g. John told Bill to wash himself. *
Considering these sentenses we might conclude that the noun closest to the reflexive pronoum is the antecedent. But
h. John promised Bill to wash himself.
The reflexive can be in the subject position as in (i), but not as in (j):
i. John believes himself to be intelligent.
j. John believes that himself is intelligent.*
k. John showed Bill a picture of himself.
The reflexive pronoun could refer either to Jhon or Bill.
The Critical Period Hypothesis suggests that all animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to acquire certain kinds of knowledge/skills at specific times of life.
Beyond this critical period, it is difficult, or even impossible to acquire those abilities.
That way, children who are not given access to language in infancy and early childhood will not learn language if these deprivations go on for to long.
It is difficult to presume the evidence of the CPH based only on unusual cases.
It is possible to attribute this kind of language disability to several factors such as:
biological maturity
brain damage
developmental delays
specific language impairment
Profoundly deaf children with hearing parents, coming from ordinary homes do not have access to language at the appropriate time.
The parents may not realize that their children cannot hear because they are able to use the other senses to interact.
After sometime in early childhood, children may learn sign language.
Language acquisition is an example of the ability children have of learn from experience, due to thousands of hours of interaction with people and objects around them.
Interactionists emphasize there is a close relationship between children's cognitive development and their acquisition of language.
The children's cognitive development partly influences their use of language.
Language can be used to represent knowledge that children have acquired through physical interaction and manipulation of objects in the environment.
The use of the term bigger depends on the children's understanding of the concepts it represents.
Language develops primarily from social interactions .
In a supportive interactive environment children are able to advance to higher levels of knowledge and performance.
A metaphorical place in which children could do more thant they would be capable of independently.
It is important for children to have conversations with adults to improve their use of language.
What children need to learn is essentially available to them in the language they are exposed to.
Connectionistis explain language acquisition in terms of how children acquire links or connections between words and phrases and the situations they occur.
When a child hears a word or phrase in an specific context, an association is made in the child's mind between the word and the what it represents.
Hearing the word brings to mind the object.
Seeing the object brings to mind the word.
The word CAT refering to the family's cat.
All CATS are CATS.
All furry creatures with feline caracteristics are CATS.
A second language learner is different from a child acquiring a first language, both in terms of learner's characteristics and the environment in which the learning occurs.
By definition, all second language learners have already acquired at least one language and have an idea of how languages work.
This knowledge, on the other hand, can lead learners to make incorrect guesses about how the second language works, resulting in errors first language learners would not make.
Successful language acquisition draws on different mental abilities, specific to language learning. It has been suggested that older learners draw on their problem solving and metalinguistic abilities because they can no longer access their innate language acquisition ability.
Children are often willing to use the second language, even whey their proficiency is quite limited.
Many adults and adolescents find it stressful when they are unable to express themselves clearly and correctly.
informal settings
formal settings
How do the first language learning theories apply to second language learning?
Behaviourist perspective had influenced the development of the AUDIOLINGUAL teaching materials and teacher training, which emphasized mimicry and memorization.
Language development is about the formation of habits: the habits of the first language can interfere in the development of habits needed for the second language learning.
The Constrative Analysis Hypothesis suggests that, in some aspects, the first language and the target language are similar and learners are able to acquire the similar structures easily.
On the other hand, students may face difficulties when the two languages structures differ from each other.
Chomsky argued that the principles of the Universal Grammar permits all children to acquire the language of their environment during a critical period of development.
Lydia White (2003a) suggests that Universal Grammar offers the best perspective from which to understand second language acquisition.
Bley-Vroman (1983) and Schachter (1990) argue that UG is not a good explanation for the acquisition of a second language, especially for those who have passed the critical period.
Vivian Cook (2003) points out that learners know more about the language than they could reasonably have learned depending only on the input they are exposed to, even if they have failed in mastering the target language.
Bonnie Schwartz (1993) concludes that formal instruction and feedback change the superficial appearance of language performance and do not affect the systematic knowledge of the new language. Rather, acquisition is based on the avaliability of the language in the learner's environment.
Lydia White (1991) thinks that the nature of the UG is altered by the acquisition of the first language. The language learners may sometimes need explicitly information about grammatical and ungrammatical, or they may assume some equivalents is first and second.
Stephen Krashen's (1982) Monitor Model assumes that the formal learning, which is a conscious process, is often used to evaluate the informal learning, an unconscious process.
We acquire as we are exposed to samples of the second language, with no conscious attention to the language form. On the other hand, we learn consciously, learning rules and forms.
We have two different systems: The LEARNED system and the ACQUIRED system. The acquired system is responsible for language use spontaneously. The learned system acts as an editor to polish what the acquired system has produced.
Second language acquisition unfolds in predictable sequences, or pre-determined order.
Acquisition occurs when one is exposed to language that is comprehensible and that contains i+1.
level of language acquired
language that is one step beyond the level
The affective filter is a metaphorical barrier that prevents learners from acquiring language even when appropriate input is available.
The information processing model of human learning see second language acquisition as the building up of knowledge that can eventually be called on automatically for speaking and understanding.
Learners at the earliest stages will use most of their resources to understand the main words in a message, not noticing grammatical morphemes attached to some words, specially those that do not affect meaning.
Gradually, through experience and practice, information becomes easier to process and access.
Proficient speakers give their full attention to the overall meaning of a text or conversation. Their word choice and pronunciation is essentially automatic.
J. R. Anderson (1995) and Robert DeKeyser (1998, 2001) suggest the existence of the DECLARATIVE KNOWLEDGE and the PROCEDUAL KNOWLEDGE.
DELARATIVE KNOWLEDGE
PROCEDUAL KNOWLEDGE
to know what
to know how
Connectionists argue that learners build up their knowledge through thousands of instances of linguistic features they hear. Hearing language features over and over again helps learners to develop a strong network of connected language elements.
Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney (1981) argued that learners come to understand how to use language functions through the exposure to thousands of examples of language associated with meanings.
Conversational interaction is essential for second language acquisition.
A mechanism to make language comprehensible.
The learner does not necessarily need simplification of the linguistic forms, but an opportunity to interact with other speakers, working together to reach mutual comprehension.
Vygotsky assumes that cognitive development, including language development, arises as a result of social interactions.
The ZPD is a metaphorical location in which learners co-construct knowledge in collaboration with an interlocutor. in Krashen's i+1 the input comes from outside the learner and the emphasis is on the comprehensibility of input that includes language features that are just beyond the learner's current developmental level.
In the interaction hypothesis, the emphasis is on the individual cognitive processes in the mind of the learner. Interaction facilitates those cognitive processes by giving learners access to the input they need to activate internal processes. In Vygostkian theory, greater importance is attached to the conversations themselves, with learning occurring through social interaction. People gain control of and reorganize their cognitive processes during meditation as knowledge is internalized during social interactions.