BACKGROUND ISSUES
IN
LANGUAGE LEARNING
MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE
Children’s language acquisition;
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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
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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