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Psycholinguistics. Second language acquisition. Acquisition and learning. Acquisition Gradual development Communicative situations Learning Conscious process of accumulating knowledge Babies acquire language Long-term residents of a country acquire language. Language proficiency.
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Psycholinguistics Second language acquisition
Acquisition and learning • Acquisition • Gradual development • Communicative situations • Learning • Conscious process of accumulating knowledge • Babies acquire language • Long-term residents of a country acquire language
Language proficiency • Acquisition usually leads to greater proficiency • Some parts of the language are more difficult to acquire than others • Conrad effect • Think about linguistic strata • Lateralization • Teenagers are quicker at learning language (and math) than young children • Cognitive skills are important too
Affective (emotional) filter • A term used by Stephen Krashen • A barrier to acquisition • What activates the filter? • Teenage self-consciousness • Embarrassment about making funny sounds • No empathy with the foreign culture or its speakers • Boring textbooks • No interesting activities • Bad classroom environment • Exhausting schedule
Teaching methods: (1) Grammar translation • Like learning any other subject • Students learn vocabulary and (prescriptive) grammar rules • “Does not enable students to use language in the country” • This depends on the student! • It is probably not true of the people in this room • http://www.nthuleen.com/papers/720report.html
(2) Audiolingual method • Advocated by Robert Lado • Essentially now discredited, because we now know that language acquisition is not a mechanical process • Habit formation • Based on drills (mechanical or meaningful) • Keep doing it until students perform without errors • (but of course they make errors in real life) • Syllabus (course plan) based on structure rather than functions • This week: Present tense, not this week: Going shopping in the USA
Designer methods • The silent way • Teacher mostly remains silent. Students figure out language patterns using colored rods?! • Facilitates learning through discovery • TPR • Mostly for kids • Language input with body motions • Acting out stories, giving commands • Not really useful at advanced level • Suggestopedia (find a link yourself) • “LEARN ENGLISH IN THREE WEEKS!!!” • Flashcards, soothing music • Students are at a good state of “relaxed alertness” • Both it and TPR are supposed to stimulate right brain motor activity
Communicative approach • Emphasis is on function, not form • And on fluency and communicative quality, not grammatical and pronunciation errors • Different attitude to errors • They are part of the learning process • Just like broke – breaked – broke • Interesting and meaningful input • Materials from the real world • Task-based learning • Groups or pairs complete a task • It should have a non-linguistic outcome (doing something real, not just vocabulary matching or answering questions)
Currently popular TBL Lexical approach Data-driven learning (DDL) Computer-assisted language learning (CALL)