Psycholinguistics
Second language acquisition
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Acquisition and learning
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Acquisition
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Learning
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Gradual development
Communicative situations
Conscious process of accumulating knowledge
Babies acquire language
Long-term residents of a country acquire
language
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Language proficiency
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Acquisition usually leads to greater proficiency
Some parts of the language are more difficult to
acquire than others
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Conrad effect
Think about linguistic strata
Lateralization
Teenagers are quicker at learning language (and
math) than young children
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Cognitive skills are important too
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Affective (emotional) filter
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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
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Teaching methods: (1) Grammar
translation
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Like learning any other subject
Students learn vocabulary and (prescriptive)
grammar rules
“Does not enable students to use language in the
country”
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This depends on the student!
It is probably not true of the people in this room
http://www.nthuleen.com/papers/720report.html
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(2) Audiolingual method
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Advocated by Robert Lado
Essentially now discredited, because we now know that
language acquisition is not a mechanical process
Habit formation
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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
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This week: Present tense, not this week: Going shopping in the
USA
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Designer methods
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The silent way
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TPR
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Teacher mostly remains silent. Students figure out language patterns
using colored rods?!
Facilitates learning through discovery
Mostly for kids
Language input with body motions
Acting out stories, giving commands
Not really useful at advanced level
Suggestopedia (find a link yourself)
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“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
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Communicative approach
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Emphasis is on function, not form
And on fluency and communicative quality, not
grammatical and pronunciation errors
Different attitude to errors
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Interesting and meaningful input
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They are part of the learning process
Just like broke – breaked – broke
Materials from the real world
Task-based learning
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Groups or pairs complete a task
It should have a non-linguistic outcome (doing something real, not
just vocabulary matching or answering questions)
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Currently popular
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TBL
Lexical approach
Data-driven learning (DDL)
Computer-assisted language learning
(CALL)
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