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Language Learning and Teaching

ABAY KAZAKH NATIONAL PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY

 

 

THEME: Language Learning and Teaching

 

DONE BY:Alieva Janar

 

 

Language Learning and Teaching

Not until the second half of the twentieth century did researchers begin to analyze child language system­atically and to try to discover the nature of the psycholinguistic process that enables every human being to gain fluent control of an exceedingly complex system of communication. In a matter of a few decades some giant strides were taken especially in the generative and cognitive models of language in describing the acquisition of particular languages and in probing universal aspects of acquisition.

This wave of research in child language acquisition led language teachers and teacher trainers to study some of the general findings of such research with a view to drawing analogies between first and second language acquisition and even to justifying certain teaching methods and techniques on the basis of first language learning principles. On the sur­face it is entirely reasonable to make the analogy. After all all children given a normal developmental environment acquire their native languages fluently and efficiently; moreover they acquire them "naturally " without special instruction although not without significant effort and attention to language. The direct comparisons must be treated with caution however. There are dozens of salient differences between first and second language learning; the most obvious difference in the case of adult second language learning is the tremendous cognitive and affective contrast between adults and children. A detailed examination of these differences is made in Chapter 3.

This chapter is designed to outline issues in first language learning as a foundation on which you can build an understanding of principles of second language learning. A coherent grasp of the nature of first language learning is an invaluable aid if not an essential component in the con­struction of a theory of second language acquisition.This chapter provides an overview of various theoretical positions—positions that can be related to the paradigms discussed in Chapter 1 —in first language acquisition and a discussion of some key issues that are particularly significant for an understanding of second language learning.


THEORIES OF FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

 

Everyone at some time has witnessed the remarkable ability of children to communicate. As small babies children babble and coo and cry and vocally or nonvocally send an extraordinary number of messages and receive even more messages. As they reach the end of their first year children make spe­cific attempts to imitate words and speech sounds they hear around them and about this time they utter their first "words." By about 18 months of age these words have multiplied considerably and are beginning to appear in two-word and three-word "sentences"—commonly referred to as "tele­graphic" utterances—such as "allgone milk " "bye-bye Daddy " "gimme toy " and so forth. The production tempo now begins to increase as more and more words are spoken every day and more and more combinations of two- and three-word sentences are uttered. By about age three children can comprehend an incredible quantity of linguistic input; their speech capacity mushrooms as they become the generators of nonstop chattering and incessant conversation language thereby becoming a mixed blessing for those around them! This fluency continues into school age as children internalize increasingly complex structures expand their vocabulary and sharpen communicative skills. At school age children not only learn what to say but what not to say as they learn the social functions of their language.



How can we explain this fantastic journey from that first anguished cry at birth to adult competence in a language? From the first word to tens of thousands? From telegraphese at eighteen months to the compound-complex cognitively precise socioculturally appropriate sentences just a few short years later? These are the sorts of questions that theories of language acquisition attempt to answer.

In principle one could adopt one of two polarized positions in the study of first language acquisition. Using the schools of thought referred to in the previous chapter an extreme behavioristic position would claim that children come into the world with a tabula rasa a clean slate bearing no preconceived notions about the world or about language and that these children are then shaped by their environment and slowly conditioned through various schedules of reinforcement. At the other constructivist extreme is the position that makes not only the rationalist/cognitivist claim that children come into this world with very specific innate knowledge predispositions and biological timetables but that children learn to func­tion in a language chiefly through interaction and discourse.

These positions represent opposites on a continuum with many pos­sible positions in between.Three such points are elucidated in this chapter. The first (behavioristic) position is set in contrast to the second (nativist) and third (functional) positions.


Behavioristic Approaches

 

Language is a fundamental part of total human behavior and behaviorists examined it as such and sought to formulate consistent theories of first language acquisition. The behavioristic approach focused on the immedi­ately perceptible aspects of linguistic behavior—the publicly observable responses—and the relationships or associations between those responses and events in the world surrounding them. A behaviorist might consider effective language behavior to be the production of correct responses to stimuli. If a particular response is reinforced it then becomes habitual or conditioned. Thus children produce linguistic responses that are rein­forced. This is true of their comprehension as well as production responses although to consider comprehension is to wander just a bit out of the publicly observable realm. One learns to comprehend an utterance by responding appropriately to it and by being reinforced for that response.

One of the best-known attempts to construct a behavioristic model of linguistic behavior was embodied in B.F. Skinner's classic Verbal Behavior (1957). Skinner was commonly known for his experiments with animal behavior but he also gained recognition for his contributions to education through teaching machines and programmed learning (Skinner 1968). Skinner's theory of verbal behavior was an extension of his general theory of learning by operant conditioning.Operant conditioning refers to con­ditioning in which the organism (in this case a human being) emits a response or operant(a sentence or utterance) without necessarily observable stimuli; that operant is maintained (learned) by reinforcement (for example a positive verbal or nonverbal response from another person). If a child says "want milk" and a parent gives the child some milk the operant is reinforced and over repeated instances is conditioned. According to Skinner verbal behavior like other behavior is controlled by its consequences. When consequences are rewarding behavior is main­tained and is increased in strength and perhaps frequency. When conse­quences are punishing or when there is a total lack of reinforcement the behavior is weakened and eventually extinguished.

Skinner's theories attracted a number of critics not the least among them Noam Chomsky (1959) who penned a highly critical review of Verbal Behavior. Some years later however Kenneth MacCorquodale (1970) published a reply to Chomsky's review in which he eloquently defended Skinner's points of view. And so the battle raged on. Today vir­tually no one would agree that Skinner's model of verbal behavior ade­quately accounts for the capacity to acquire language for language development itself for the abstract nature of language or for a theory of meaning. A theory based on conditioning and reinforcement is hard-pressed to explain the fact that every sentence you speak or write—with a few trivial exceptions—is novel never before uttered either by you or by anyone else! These novel utterances are nevertheless created by the speaker and processed by the hearer.

In an attempt to broaden the base of behavioristic theory some psy­chologists proposed modified theoretical positions. One of these positions was mediationtheory in which meaning was accounted for by the claim that the linguistic stimulus (a word or sentence) elicits a "mediating" response that is self-stimulating. Charles Osgood (1953 1957) called this self-stimulation a "representational mediation process " a process that is really covert and invisible acting within the learner. It is interesting that mediation theory thus attempted to account for abstraction by a notion that reeked of "mentalism"—a cardinal sin for dyed-in-the-wool behaviorists! In fact in some ways mediation theory was really a rational/cognitive theory masquerading as behavioristic.

Mediation theories still left many questions about language unan­swered. The abstract nature of language and the relationship between meaning and utterance were unresolved. All sentences have deep struc­tures—the level of underlying meaning that is only manifested overtly by surface structures. These deep structures are intricately interwoven in a person's total cognitive and affective experience. Such depths of language were scarcely plumbed by mediational theory.

Yet another attempt to account for first language acquisition within a behavioristic framework was made by Jenkins and Palermo (1964). While admitting (p. 143) that their conjectures were "speculative" and "prema­ture " the authors attempted to synthesize notions of generative linguistics and mediational approaches to child language. They claimed that the child may acquire frames of a linear pattern of sentence elements and learn the stimulus-response equivalences that can be substituted within each frame; imitation was an important if not essential aspect of establishing stimulus-response associations. But this theory too failed to account for the abstract nature of language for the child's creativity and for the inter­active nature of language acquisition.

It would appear that the rigor of behavioristic psychology with its emphasis on empirical observation and the scientific method only began to explain the miracle of language acquisition. It left untouched genetic and interactionist domains that could be explored only by approaches that probed more deeply.


The Nativist Approach

 

Nativist approaches to the study of child language asked some of those deeper questions. The term nativistis derived from the fundamental asser­tion that language acquisition is innately determined that we are born with a genetic capacity that predisposes us to a systematic perception of language around us resulting in the construction of an internalized system of language.

Innateness hypotheses gained support from several sides. Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed that language is a "species-specific" behavior and that certain modes of perception categorizing abilities and other language-related mechanisms are biologically determined. Chomsky (1965) similarly claimed the existence of innate properties of language to explain the child's mastery of a native language in such a short time despite the highly abstract nature of the rules of language. This innate knowledge according to Chomsky is embodied in a "little black box" of sorts a language acquisition device(LAD). McNeill (1966) described LAD as consisting of four innate linguistic properties:

 

the ability to distinguish speech sounds from other sounds in the environment

the ability to organize linguistic data into various classes that can later be refined

knowledge that only a certain kind of linguistic system is possible and that other kinds are not and

the ability to engage in constant evaluation of the developing lin­guistic system so as to construct the simplest possible system out of the available linguistic input.

 

McNeill and other Chomskyan disciples composed eloquent argu­ments for the appropriateness of the LAD proposition especially in con­trast to behavioristic stimulus-response (S-R) theory which was so limited in accounting for the generativity of child language. Aspects of meaning abstractness and creativity were accounted for more adequately. Even though it was readily recognized that the LAD was not literally a cluster of brain cells that could be isolated and neurologically located such inquiry on the rationalistic side of the linguistic-psychological continuum stimu­lated a great deal of fruitful research.

More recently researchers in the nativist tradition have continued this line of inquiry through a genre of child language acquisition research that focuses on what has come to be known as Universal Grammar(see Cook 1993: 200-245; Mitchell & Myles 1998: 42-71 for an overview). Positing that all human beings are genetically equipped with abilities that enable them to acquire language researchers expanded the LAD notion into a system of universal linguistic rules that went well beyond what was origi­nally proposed for the LAD. Universal Grammar (UG) research is attempting to discover what it is that all children regardless of their environmental stimuli (the language [s] they hear around them) bring to the language acquisition process. Such studies have looked at question formation nega­tion word order discontinuity of embedded clauses ("The ball that's on the table is blue") subject deletion ("Es mi hermano") and other grammatical phenomena.

One of the more practical contributions of nativist theories is evident if you look at the kinds of discoveries that have been made about how the system of child language works. Research has shown that the child's language at any given point is a legitimate system in its own right. The child's linguistic development is not a process of developing fewer and fewer "incorrect" structures not a language in which earlier stages have more "mistakes" than later stages. Rather the child's language at any stage is systematic in that the child is constantly forming hypotheses on the basis of the input received and then testing those hypotheses in speech (and comprehension). As the child's language develops those hypotheses are continually revised reshaped or sometimes abandoned.

Before generative linguistics came into vogue Jean Berko (1958) demonstrated that children learn language not as a series of separate dis­crete items but as an integrated system. Using a simple nonsense-word test Berko discovered that English-speaking children as young as four years of age applied rules for the formation of plural present progressive past tense third singular and possessives. She found for example that if a child saw one "wug" he could easily talk about two "wugs " or if he were pre­sented with a person who knows how to "gling " the child could talk about a person who "glinged" yesterday or sometimes who "glang."

Nativist studies of child language acquisition were free to construct hypothetical grammars(that is descriptions of linguistic systems) of child language although such grammars were still solidlybased on empirical data. These grammars were largely formal representations of the deep structure—the abstract rules underlying surface output the structure not overtly manifest in speech. Linguists began to examine child language from early one- and two-word forms of "telegraphese" to thecomplex language of five-to ten year-olds. Borrowing one tenet of structural and behavioristic paradigms they approached the data with few preconceived notions about what the child's language ought to be and probed the data for internally consistent systems in much the same way that a linguist describes a language in the "field." The use of a generative framework was of course a departure from structural methodology.

 


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 878


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