BACKGROUND ISSUES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

BACKGROUND ISSUES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

Children’s language acquisition; • • Subconscious Result of massive exposure Can be more than one By the age of six or seven

Children have ; • Powerful insentive to communicate • Instinct to let people know if they are hungry. . etc at the pre-word phase • Expose to speacial kind of lanuage by adults; exaggerated intonation, higher pitc, shorter sentences, simplified

Can the sucess in first language acquisition be replicated in language-learning classrooms?

ACQUISITON & LEARNING • Picking up a language (in target language community, no formal attention) closer First-language acquisition

This fact is recognized by HAROLD PALMER SPONTANEOUS CAPABILITIES Acquisition of language naturally & subconsciously STUDIAL CAPABILITIES Students’ organizing their learning, application of conscious knowledge in the task

ACQUISITION-LEARNING HYPOTHESIS by STEPHEN KRASHEN Acquisition -Subconscious -Easily used in spontaneous conversation -İnstantly available Learning -Conscious -Taught and studied as grammar and vocab. -Help us to monitor our spontaneous conversation MONITOR HYPOTHESIS

COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT • i+1 Comprehensible input slightly above learners’ level Roughly tuned (aids acquisition) • İ Finely tuned (as most instructors do)

CONTRIBUTIONS OF BEHAVIORISM

DIRECT METHOD • • Only target language in classroom Form and meaning association Use of real objects, pics or demonstrations A very antithesis of purely acquisitionbased view of SL(second language) • Depends on the idea ; input Ss receive= intake

Combination of DM and behaviorist view leads AUDIOLINGUALISM • Emphasis on drilling • Follows stimulus-response-reinforcement model

Deschooling society by Ivan Illich • Questioned the purpose of formal education • Claimed that learning is not the result of instruction • Stated that involving Ss in solving communication problems is effective • Shifted the attention from product of learning to the process of learning

FOCUS ON FORM or FOCUS ON FORMS? • Solving communication problems in TL Task-based language teaching Learning through preformance of communicative tasks

• Focus on form Conscious attention To some feature of language; Verb tense, organization of paragraphs İncidental, opportunistic Grows out of communicative tasks More effective focus on forms Focusing on the series of language Forms one by one because they are On the syllabus

Making sense of it all • Behaviorism is not completely absurd • Repetitions clearly works • Exaggerated concern for monitoring impedes spontaneous speech • Acquisition and learning are seperate process • Individual differences of learners are important in learning process

THE IMPORTANCE OF REPETITION • The more ss come across the language , the more repeated encounters they have • The better chance they have of remembering • Gains from repeated tasks

THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE -better learning when Ss think about language Ex: thinking about the sentence elements, verb tenses. . etc - cognitive depth enables more understanding and remembering - examples for guidance instead of explicit teaching of grammar,

• Discovering is effective but may not be suitable for all learners • Exposed to language over-complex , Ss may not make any meaningful analysis.

Arousal, affect and Humanistic Teaching • Ss feelings in learning process Positive feelings learning potential Negative feelings • Krashen’s affective filter hypothesis

Carl Rogers and Humanistic View -experience learning rather than taught -Ss emotionally involved -reflection and creativitiy -whole person -self actualization -feelings and emotions

Critic • Concentration of inner-self limit language learning • Too much attention to affective domain therefore neglecting the cognitive and intellectual development • Teacher role ; monitoring